The Fog of War (October 2022)

Everywhere you turn, the fog is never more than an arm's length away. It feels closer—its cold, moist breath reeking of charred wood, burning petrol, and freshly-exploded earth—and penetrates the dirty, ragged fatigues of an infantryman lost and alone in a treeless landscape in an expanding present that is neither day nor night. The past ... is hidden or forgotten; the future, inaccessible. Exiled in a frozen moment devoid of expectations and remembrances. An eternal limbo between life and death.

Bodies, whole and dismembered, litter the floor of what might have been a forest perhaps long ago enjoyed on family picnics or lovers' trysts. Now, deserted of life—the kingdoms of flora and fauna thoroughly routed and annihilated. Only the sound of your own breathing and the pulse of blood not yet stopped, though all around all has ceased.

From behind—but which direction is that now that you've turned in circles over and over to espy any movement, a light, a smell, a sound. You feel something that you think you should be hearing. Boots marching in voiceless rhythm ... coming from where and headed where? The enemy? Claiming this waste land that bears no resemblance to anything of value or anything worth fighting for .... or dying for. Reinforcements to "take up our quarrel with the foe"—more fodder for the voracious fog that consumes men? Nothing visible. No vibrations in the watery air, but a strong sense of an orderly and regimented movement of bodies.

The presentiment comes no closer and recedes no further, but continues as if thousands, tens of thousands, are making their way somewhere ... to a new battle? But where? And whose are they? Theirs or ours?

The damp cold is numbing, the hunger of countless days confounds rational thought. the loneliness of being in this abysmal place—nowhere—and this time—an endless present—gnaws at the soul.

But who are 'they,' and who, for that matter, are 'we?' And why are 'we' here? And yet, why is no one here? There persists, however, a chilling sense of a moving mass inexorably making its way to its next deployment. But where? Is this the destination towards which they're headed? This graveyard of dreams and hopes and love and belonging. Don't they know where they're going? Don't they understand that this is the end of the line? Don't they feel that they're being swallowed in this great gray meaninglessness?

Who sends them? Would they go of their own free will? Or, are they automatons, brainwashed and emptied of all individuality and will, reduced to monochromatic formlessness like their surroundings? Or, do they have a gun to their heads ... in a more literal sense?

Why do they keep coming? Don't they recognize their destiny all around them—the soulless carcasses of a generation, maybe two, lying about unburied and unmourned? Who will be left to remember? To commemorate? To honour? A myth! Another delusion. The mendacity and our gullibility know no limits. The pattern of deception and trust recurs under our very noses, right in front of our eyes, within our hearing, fooling us, tripping us up, slipping past our defenses again and again.

Be still boots! Damn you! Stop! Oh, how my head hurts!

The vast maw of the fog gorges on the never ending train of human flesh and the human sacrifice, willing or compelled, submits. There is no god (or god is as good as dead), but is there no man as well? Is this parade towards death the final act of a once-proud species? Sunk to the muddy bottom of this boundless fog, the human husks set to form a fossil record of self-extermination.

Is this for my sake? Why am I cursed to witness this? Who am I to be delivered this message? I'm no leader, no representative. Just one among billions. But ... am I to be the last one? Must I be the last one?

Those damn boots. Their thudding batters my skull without pause. Will they never come to an end? Why won't they stop and let me sleep? Is it their torture to march in perpetuity to their own ashen doom, tormented with the foreknowledge of what awaits?

Release?

As if such a thing as hope exists in these cold, murky depths.