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