Shocktroopers: Jumping into Filth

With this story, you might be flustered with the ‘machete’ order that I’m going to write it in. Its hopefully going to be a group a short stories in a potential larger, stream-lined plot that I hope to shape (ideally a novel). But please forgive me if you find it to be all over the place. After building some consistency, I will consider writing it out in a sequential format but as for now, it will be in this choppy-MacGyver-esque format. For the first installment you can click here

Rain continued to pour on the Allied trenches. Jeb had come a long way since his days as a school teacher.

He mucked around in the trenches, seeing the replacements that they had to take on. Indian Sepoy troops left the mud pool of Ypres. Jeb and his fellows gazed on the sullen faces of the relieved Indian troops.

This was the first time Jeb had ever met or seen an Indian man. He had only read in his studies of the mysteries of India, of how Wellington had taken the land back from Napoleon and the ensuing rise of the British Raj.

He had heard speeches Britain had come to liberate their cousins in India. Including the formidable Gurkha’s of Nepal.

Jeb thought that a a bit too idealistic and his time at war proved it more so. However, it was an opinion that was not very popular and so kept such things to himself.

Eyes gazing at one Sepoy’s sullen face, bodies surrounding their mishap of a trench line, the lines on the mans face, the tatters of his army kit, and periodic scratching of his utility jacket, Jeb saw defeat. It was a defeat of that of a candle on its last bit of fuel before being consumed by the rain. Those dead brown eyes of the Indian trooper were of a dying humanity.

The two maintained their gaze, not speaking a word, exchanging a conversation of silence. Jeb felt a rising feeling of approaching misery and when his gaze broke off from the Gurkha’s eyes as the two walked past each other, Jeb looked to the trenches in horror.

Where sandbags were to be used as per protocol to fill trenches up, raising fortifications and provide protection for machine gunners, there were fortifications of the dead.

Piled atop one another haphazardly, the bodies of both the enemy and their own had been thrown up on the top of the trenches to provide replacement for sandbags. A pit rose in Jeb’s stomach and his heart sank.

He held back a rising acid burning at the back of his throat, trying to compose himself. He swallowed and shakily made his way down into their trench line; their new home for the unforeseeable future.

A splash of water soaked his boots, as Jeb didn’t take his eyes off the wall of corpses that gazed down upon him. Rats scurried through the disturbance of so many new men dropping into the creatures’ home.

How much his life had changed since his enlistment. Jeb, a promising academy teacher for Boys preparing to head off to college had dreamed for so long to join the army. As a naive and curious young man, Jeb was drawn to what the war experience seemed to foretell to him.

It was a chance to explore. It was a chance to see the world and experience true mental and physical tests. He had always scolded his students on the promise of physical fitness and mental fortitude.

While teaching history, Jeb would actively train, he’d lift weights, and he would box. In fact he was incredibly inspired by the recent rise of Theodore Roosevelt down in the United States.

Like his fellow teachers, he questioned how much Canada would give to the hungry American President but still could not help but admire the man’s personal vigor.

The vigorous life is what Jeb would echo to his students. And the War beckoned him to answer the call.

So Jeb had signed up.