Sterile hands and sterile clothes
The Thirteenth Jury~
When twelve is not enough
And there he stood,
atop the muddy mound above the trenches. If death had a smell then the mound, consisting of a combination of dampen mixture of clay and dark soil intertwined with rotting tree roots, gravel and evidence of small pieces of broken rusted metal shardes, would be it.
His back profile was to the sun.
Strapped with his sidearm, a regulation, issued military pistol in its holster at his waist. Across his chest he held onto his rifle. His right hand fully extended held the rifle just above its wooden handle but below the trigger mechanism. With his left hand he held on to the extend barrel bringing the rifle to sit at a ninety degree angle to his upper body.
From the angle of the late afternoon sun beating down against his back, his sun enhanced image formed a figure larger than the reality of his 6' 3" 220 lb frame. Looking down on his men in the trenches below, he radiated an outline of a star inside a hazy circle with its darkened core being that of his motionless image.
The beams of light blocked by his image, made even more spectacular those emerging from his outline, giving a Godlike figure to those looking up at him.
Beads of sweat hid the miniature fractures in his facial skin. His face having been tortured by the wind, the rain, humidity and the intermittent but seemingly endless, unrelenting dryness of this patch of land, home for the past several weeks while the dusty, grime filled trenches, their beds.
There was an eeire silence, a frightening stillness where in actuality the sound of silence was the loudest of sounds. The sky above the trenches, as if sharing a moment’s blessing upon the men, was a cloud free clear blue sky. No such generosity was offered in the sky behind and beyond the the image of the Captain as visible to the men in the trenches.
The horizon beyond the captain’s back profile was more reflective of the situation that had brought these men to this place. On the horizon, moving towards the men, were dark heavy clouds indicating a certainty of thunderstorms. As the clouds moved they slowly began to eat away at the small clearing of blue sky immediately above the men.
Among the men in the trenches, nothing moved. A slow panning of the camera as it zoomed in on each and every face would reveal nothing. No emotions! There was neither joy nor sadness not even the impersonality of indifference.
Earlier it had taken a single cannon shot to sliced through their front line, surgically separating this lead group from their much larger supporting group behind. Over the next several hours, between the bloodshed, the screaming, the pain, the agonizing decisions that had to have been made for the dead and or the dying all resulted in this small group becoming trapped behind enemy lines. The silence now that they were experiencing was the bitter sweet knowledge of the realization that the dying had died and the dead had long since lost all reason to care.
Ahead of any possibility to rejoin their larger group were at least two battalions of the enemy in pursuit of their supporting line. What limited communications they were able to maintain informed them that their larger group had drawn their line in the proverbial sand about 20 miles beyond their present position. There they were now reinforced by their lifeline of military support from air, sea and land.
The foreshadowing, the ominous stormy clouds above were the written epithets of every single man now stranded in the trenches. While the single cannon shot had taken many lives, rewriting the plans of generals in safe places, miles away from the hell and damnation of their reality, what was heading directly in their direction would be worse.
They were only twelve with the Captain making the thirteenth. What was heading directly over their trenches were five battalions. Early scouting report stated there were upwards of one thousand men in each battalion. With the aerial fire power of the oncoming force there would be no possibility of a maverick style air rescue for the men. When added to the number of soldiers, the accompanying variety of military hardware all moving with a take no prisoner directive, the men in the trenches knew one thing with certainty.
The Captain was faced with a decision that no one should ever have to make and most certainly no where in his long line of military knowledge or formal tactical education was he made ready for such a decision. With only 12 men at this command he shared all incoming information. In their most recent communication they were informed that they could stay where they were while air defenses would try and delay the oncoming. They could move towards the death ahead of them and inflict what life in its generosity would offer them, upon the enemy. They could move away from the fight, still towards home while traveling 50 miles to outflank the width of the enemy’s frontal force but the oncoming force’s speed and width would almost certainly intercept them before they could achieve the outflanking distance of 50 miles away.
It was with this backdrop that when the Captain earlier stood upon that mound and said, “Men! We need to move! We can either move forward into the enemy ahead, backwards into the oncoming or sideways in an effort to outflank the their frontline but we shall not stay still like sitting ducks!”
It was with that said, when from the trenches, upon the lips of the twelve men came silence. It was a silence not to be mistaken as having been frozen with fear. It was not the silence of disobedience nor was it the silence of prayer. Most likely they had each in their own way said many a prayer on their journey to this very point but this was not a prayer moment. This was more of a unspoken collective moment of reflection. The kind of reflection that questioned the decisions that got them to this place. It was their unspoken criticism of the madness that saw so many commerads perish in the most horrible of manner. It was the collection of unspoken reflective thought of the one option that was never offered.
@Anthony2023mdh30Vibes
