Vox Meditantis

1st September, 1917

The rats have grown bold again. They scurry between the duckboards as though they own this godforsaken stretch of earth, and perhaps they do. Fat as terriers, some of them, gorged on what I dare not contemplate. I watch them in the pre-dawn gloom and wonder if they, too, dream of gentler places – of warm hearths and clean straw, of barns that smell of hay rather than cordite and worse things.

Three years now since I took the King’s shilling, and still I carry her photograph next to my heart. The glass cracked during the push at Messines, spider-webbing across her dear face, but I cannot bear to replace it. Mary Elizabeth Evans, with her hair pinned just so and that knowing smile that promised… what? That I should return to claim her hand? That love could survive this mechanised hell we have made of Christ’s green earth?

Fritz has been quiet these past two days, which fills me with more dread than his heaviest bombardment. When the enemy rests, it means he is preparing something fearsome. The very birds seem to sense it – not a lark nor thrush to be heard, though once this land must have rung with their sweet chorus at daybreak. Now only the carrion crows hold dominion here, black as parsons in their funeral dress, picking at secrets best left buried.

What torments me most is not the prospect of death – for that, at least, would be swift – but the fear that I shall die unloved, or worse, that she will have given her heart to another while I rot in these trenches like a mole in his tunnel. The letters come less frequently now. Three weeks since the last, and I have read it so many times the paper threatens to part at the creases. “Dearest Arthur,” it begins, but I detect a cooling in her tone, a formality that cuts deeper than German steel.

The horses brought up rations yesterday, poor beasts labouring through the mud with their loads. One bay mare, coat dulled with grime, looked at me with such patient suffering in her great brown eyes that I was moved near to weeping. She bore her burden without complaint, though the shells screamed overhead and the ground shook beneath her hooves. There is a nobility in her silent endurance that puts my own fretting to shame.

What brings a tear of joy to your eye? Young Parker asked me this very question as we shared a cigarette by the brazier. The lad has a poet’s soul, though this is no place for such tender sensibilities. I thought long before answering, watching the smoke rise like incense toward Heaven’s distant vault.

“The memory of a yellow dog,” I told him finally, and saw the surprise in his mud-streaked face. “A mongrel cur that belonged to my Mary’s family. Patch, they called him, for the white mark upon his forehead like a star. He would wait for me each evening by their garden gate, tail beating against the palings as though I were the Prince of Wales himself come calling.”

Even now, recounting it, I feel the salt sting behind my eyes – not of sorrow, but of purest joy. For in that faithful hound I glimpsed something of love’s true nature: constant, forgiving, expecting nothing save the pleasure of reunion. If I close my eyes, I can still feel his warm tongue upon my hand, still hear his delighted whimpering as Mary and I walked the lanes in those golden evenings before the world went mad.

The guns have started up again – our own, this time, laying down a barrage that will herald tomorrow’s push. I must try to sleep, though rest comes fitfully in this place where the dead outnumber the living and the rats grow bold as lions. If Providence wills it, I shall see another sunset. If not, perhaps that yellow dog waits for me in greener pastures than these.

May God preserve her, wherever she may be. May He keep faith alive in her heart as He keeps breath in my body. And may He forgive us all for what we have made of His creation.

A. J. H.

The diary sits within the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele), a 1917 Allied offensive from the Ypres Salient that won scant ground at immense cost and mired men and horses in lethal mud. Launched after the June victory at Messines Ridge, the campaign aimed to seize higher ground and threaten German U-boat bases on the Belgian coast. Torrential rain, resilient German defences in concrete pillboxes, and shattered drainage turned the battlefield into a quagmire, stalling advances. Passchendaele’s capture in November by the Canadian Corps came with heavy casualties; strategic results were limited, foreshadowing 1918’s Allied offensives and Germany’s spring push.

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