THE FRONT: PART 3
The dark wrapped around Scott like a cloak, and although his ears were pricked all the way up, and although there was practically no noise Scott was still sure that there were Germans in the dark, waiting for the right moment to pounce and slit his throat with a bayonet.
At Basic Training the instructors had told the recruits, Scott among them, about German raiding tactics. If you were raiding you made no noise at all, no gunshots or Mill's Bomb blasts to tell the enemy where you were. If they heard you, then all it took was one flare, and they would see you as well. And just about everyone who got caught out in no man's land while raiding ended up dead, buried in the mud with no proper grave.
Raids were rare but when they did happen, they were usually nasty bloody little affairs that ended up killing about a dozen anthros and wrecking the section of trench where they took place.
Scott kept all of this in mind as he stared out into the darkness, a little part of his mind urging him to throw a Mill's Bomb. But he didn't, Wynter's words were fresh in his mind and the last thing he wanted right no, in the midst of the dark, and the unnatural silence was artillery and rifle bullets flying around.
As Scott's vision slowly adjusted to the dark, he noticed little details in the landscape in front of him. There were rotting branches and craters filled with mud and what looked like smoke. Then with a chill, scott realized that what he had thought was smoke was really lingering gas from an earlier attack. Gas could linger in the air for nearly a week if it didn't rain, but from the looks of the mud it had been raining constantly, so the gas couldn't have been there long.
Then he realized that the twisted branch in front of the parapet slit wasn't a branch. It was an arm. Scott choked down a scream and stepped backwards, nearly falling off of the parapet. The arm was badly decomposed, and dull white bone stuck through the rotting skin where shrapnel or perhaps a bullet had shattered it.
Scott tried not to look at it, but it kept drawing his eyes so he gave up and tried to ignore the nausea throbbing in his stomach. Although he didn't know it, he had just seen the true face of the war, and there was much worse yet to come.
TO BE CONTINUED IN PART FOUR...