Goddess Worldweaver

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T here was a thing he hated most, hated more than the machine guns and the gas and the stink and the death; that thing he hated was the mud. He felt as though he had become a being made of soft, wet dirt. At first the mud had been like a layer of skin, heavy and cloaking and smothering, but by now it had seemed to seep into the very center of himself, so that his heart was a muscle of clotted clay, his lungs and limbs and head mere shapes of thick, viscous soil.

For the first weeks he had kept track of the days, and for the first months he had made an effort to distinguish individual weeks. Now that the years stretched into the third hot, humid summer, the months had blended into an indistinguishable morass, vaguely broken into seasons: in winter, the mud was cold. In summer, it was not so cold.

Intermittently, when the generals ordered the colonels to order the sergeants to lead the men out of the trenches, life in the mud was enlivened by the opportunity to die. Of course he went forward with the rest of them: his own regiment, drawn from the dairy-greened countryside of the south; and all the rest, boys and young men from London and Liverpool, Glasgow and Bristol, from Wales and Ireland and the craggy Highlands of the north. They rose in a mass, cheering and charging, rifles held before them, metal helmets like inverted dinner plates on their heads.

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