This came to me as I was finishing a project for history class concerning the battle of Passchendaele in the First World War. I decided to write it as it refused to go away, so here it is. The spacing didn't work out quite how I would have liked, so I tried to remedy that with punctuation. hope it worked!. :(

Please consider I'm writing about a bit of a different Schultz, as in WWI he would have probably been in his early twenties.

Warning: May contain imagery considered graphic

Disclaimer: I don't own Hogan's Heroes

The Reasoning of a Self –Proclaimed Neutral

By: Kathy

I fought in the Great War

As a young man.

"The war to end all wars"

Yet here we live in a world plunged once more into another war

Despite our sacrifice.

I saw

Men up to their knees in trench mud.

Men cowering, hollow-eyed, quivering,

In their foxholes

As the shells screamed around them.

Men, officers, weeping as their men charged "over the top" to their deaths

Though they themselves were forbidden to leave the trench.

Bodies, mangled remains used as chairs and tables

and other pieces of furniture

by those who they had once called friends.

I heard

Screams of men as their flesh was devoured

By mustard gas,

As they choked and suffocated

Pleading for mercy that

Would not,

Could not,

Be granted them.

The tears of a lad,

No older than eighteen,

Wailing over the body of his closest companion

As it lay,

Full of shrapnel.

And I knew

For a moment

A man,

No,

A boy,

As he faced the barrel of my gun-

A frightened, questioning face

Wondering what had become of the world that had existed in his childhood dreams of not so very long ago.

I knew him.

Was he the enemy?

I was told that he was

And so I shot him

And hated myself for it.

All these things have I

Seen

And heard

And known

And that is why

Now

I see nothing

I hear nothing

I know nothing