World War 3

• Felix Le, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2022

Bang!
I awoke with a gasp, my fingers trembling. My body began shaking, goosebumps pebbled along the side of my arms and legs. Shivers went down my spine as the thought of fighting in World War 3 became deplorable.
Bang!
It was time. Time to face the music.

I looked up at the sunset. It was the battle cry to the gathering night that the only achievement of darkness is to show starlight all the more clearly as they cried out “God save the Queen!” as they charged out of their tents and into their battlefield.
Alongside me stood my fellow comrades. As one, we marched into a living Hell.
Almost immediately, we were overwhelmed by the hectic noise of rapid gunfire. It formed into a gruelling melody of life and death.

Almost immediately, I saw fellow soldiers collapse.
Blood trickled along the side of his uniform. I saw his face and the cry of pain on his face, begging to see his family again. In my head, the late night conversations of how he wished this would be all over replayed relentlessly in my head. Vaguely, I wondered what his life had been before the war and the man he would have come to be. I wondered if sacrificing my life was all worth it.
Every night, every evening and every morning, we found ourselves replaying the same gruesome scenes. Dead corpses fell to the ground, bullets ricocheted in the air.

The lucky few wore thick leather armour the rest only wore sweaters of wool. The menfolk stood in formation, four rows was all they had, their eyes trained on the battlefield to see how many of the opposition stood strong.
The battlefield lay quiet, for it was now a graveyard of the unburied. Their corpses lay among the buttercups and forget me nots. The sun still shoe and the wind still blew, but somewhere mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters waited desperately in vain. These men that were once boys who played in the yard with sticks and laughed at each other’s silly tales were now meat for birds. Their eyes were as immobile with their limbs. Their souls had long departed to the celestial planes to walk with their ancestors.

Days passed by as the acrid smell of stale gunpowder enveloped my nasal cavities. The war has grudged on for two years now. My sanity is on the verge of extinction. Perhaps that is a good thing. At the very least, I’d be allowed to leave this nightmarish dystopia. As I look around, all I can see is stray limbs and dead creatures- once fine young men, who now are no longer recognisable as human. The gunfire starts.
They said that it would be over by Christmas, but now Christmas is a long lost dream. Each body that plunges to the ground is a lost child, father, brother, friend, husband. They are- or were- suitcases for the only thing that really mattered in the world.
Peace.