one twentieth of a second

Less than one twentieth of a second. That’s how long it took for a bullet fired on one side of the trenches at the Somme to travel to the other. That’s how long it took for a bullet, packed with iron filings, wrapped tightly in steel and copper on a machine worked by the cracked, calloused hands of a woman, perhaps in Coventry, perhaps in Duseldorf, to fly parallel over the beaten land, at a height no higher than your shins, and, if aimed precisely, to rip through skin and brain, to turn a human head to a maw, a pulp, to shear tissue from bone and to cleave a face in two – less than one twentieth of a second.

A single, emaciated tree hangs upwards from the earth, striving for light in a sky scraped low, thick yellow, acrid with the lingering stench of day-old mustard gas, a solitary silhouette in a field that was once, not so long ago, a forest. A drop of rain falls from a blackened, dying branch into a puddle filled with bodies, the parts of men, legs, ears, torsos, a puddle the colour of cancer. As the raindrop falls, another shot rings out.

Alain saw all of this, the destruction, the world sick as it had never been before, the chewed land, the piles of dead, the result of technology designed to do nothing but kill working all too well on its human targets, so soft, so easily torn, rendered so utterly unrecognizable, as his squadron flew over the battlefields to attack German supply lines. The dead, the sons of mothers, fathers of children, they lay there in their mounds, the ones who had been collected, awaiting burial, and the others in the middle of No Man’s Land, those left to rot, to be pecked at by the crows in the early morning light. From up above, he could not tell who was friend or foe, who was good or evil, right or wrong. He could only tell, simply, who was living and who was not.

Those men, those bodies, they fought for something and they fought together, he thought, but they died for nothing and there they were, now, laid down on the soil, alone. Another shot rings out.

Less than one twentieth of a second. All the time in the world. All the time he needed to remember his life before the war, to remember, indeed, the man seated before him.