Victory

• Senali Jayasinghe, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2013

Moonlight. It gleams down at the Warfield; its usual bright smile now looks dismal and haunting. I burry my head in my camouflaged back pack. It has replaced the comfortable pillow on my bed at home. Squashed between a hundred other bodies in a muddy trench, I will myself to go to sleep and prepare myself for the challenges the new day will bring. The hoot of a barn owl nearby reminds me that this was not always a Warfield but farming land. It stretched on for miles, the rich soil covered in new corn plants, streams of clean water running down the ditches between the crops. It was beautiful; at least that’s what the locals say. All is different now; bodies of fallen soldiers replace the corn plants while their blood replaces the water.

A whisper arouses me from my thoughts as I turn my head to see the commander in chief studying the battle plans in his dreams. He murmurs about how we plan on attacking our enemy tomorrow to finish this ruddy war for good. I observe a beetle scurrying through the soil as sleep eventually finds me. My dreams are visited by gunshot and blood splatters, leaving my ears ringing even after I wake up in the early hours of the morning.

Eating in the battlefield is seen more as an inconvenient task instead of leisure activity. The bread tastes stale and unpleasant in my mouth as I abjectly bite into my breakfast. The atmosphere in the trenches tastes different this morning as we ready ourselves for the final attack on the enemy. Soundlessly we reload our weapons and tighten the straps on our helmets that are now caked in mud.

The sound of a whistling piercing the morning air tells me that it’s time to run as my feet takes off from the trench before the thought enters my mind. The thirst for blood takes over my beaten body as my eyes scan the horizon for enemy soldiers. Impetuously I bury my bullets in their heads as those around me do the same. Then….it’s all over. The sounds of our muddy boots pressing against the mud drenched in blood, the screams of the enemy who were not expecting our attack, the gunshots. Silence takes over the battlefield as it sweeps through the acres of wasteland now scattered with bodies. My heart is not flooded with the sweet taste of victory as I once hoped as a young solider but the bitter taste of regret and guilt. I am surrounded by a sea of dead men, some that I had killed with my own hands. Victory does not mean you were the best, but in the war field, it means you killed the most. My knees meet the fresh soil and the gun falls out of my grasp as the realisation of what winning means enters my mind.