《Jacob's War》Extract from Jacob's Diary, June 21st 1916

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I left off the earlier day’s entry as I am still too tired to continue writing for long.

Once he had dressed my shoulder, Harry stayed with me and endeavoured to keep up my spirits. My peculiar sense of calm did not desert me and the prospect of another shell finishing what the first had begun did not upset me as it might have. Harry put my silence down to my injury and the effects of shock and did all in his power to keep me conversing with him. In truth, I was most light-headed and upon trying to stand found myself incapable.

Only a short while later Lieutenant Butcher found us and ordered Harry back to the trenches as part of a general retreat. Harry refused, almost coming to blows with the man. Only the assurance that they would dispatch a stretcher party for me convinced him to obey the order, and I rather fancy he would have carried me back on his shoulders if he could.

With him gone my mind was free to wander, and with the retreat the sounds of battle subsided. Birds were audible again, in the distance at first but then closer until a murder of crows perched upon the ridge of the crater I inhabited. They called to one another raucously, before hopping down to feast on my less fortunate comrades.

And now I must write what I saw, though I scarcely believe it myself. If this journal finds its way into another’s hands, they will question my sanity but they will not be doing more than I have myself a hundred times.

Among the bodies of the fallen a mist began to rise. At first I thought it was my vision failing me, but the fog only persisted around each body and not elsewhere. Then movement, a gentle sway of the cloud surrounding each man that had no explanation in nature, the air being still as the grave the pit resembled. I began to see shapes in the mists: limbs waving, half-seen; faces inhuman in aspect but revealed as a twist in the fog and a trick of the light before reforming again all too real; bodies climbing out of the earth itself, writhing and crawling about the dead.

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I know that troubles clouded my mind; I know that my lost blood renders me an unreliable witness, but I swear upon all I ever held Holy there were waves of ghoulish figures rising from the ground to devour my friends. Under cover of an unnatural mist they feasted, and when they turned their hollow eyes upon me, I could stay no longer.

With a strength born only of fear I lurched upright, gave no backward glance at those things and stumbled back towards our lines pursued by the demons of hell.

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