Chapter Text
13th July 1916
They bring me news of more dead men every day. Some of the other men on the ward are talking about what they saw. I must have been lucky, being shot almost instantly. It meant I couldn’t get as far as the other horrors. Jack, this lad off of some farm somewhere, was saying how some got as far as the barbed wire before they fell. Hardly anyone got past that through. Tom, another private, was saying how he and his friend came to the war whole, but they buried his mate a half. I don’t want to know what happened to the rest of him, but we gets told anyway. It’s lying out in no-man’s land, being used as a cushion for some poor dead beggar. I wanted to stop listening, but you can’t. That’s like saying the war ain’t real, and it is. It’s bloody awful too. We need to remember it that way. So we don’t do it again.
They’re still fighting. Ten thousand lost already they say, though they haven’t counted them all yet. It’ll me more likely double when they finally count them all. They told me the chap who bought me the violin’s been lost too. Private Mycroft Holmes they said he was. Sherlock’s older brother. He found his little brother, but the mother’s lost them both to the Somme and the Germans and the Guns. I’ll visit her when I get back home. 221B Baker Street. That’s where they lived, and that’s where I’ll meet her. I’d rather be able to tell her myself what fine men they both were from my own mouth, not an unfeeling telegram reading ‘Missing, presumed dead’ from some man in an office who doesn’t know. He doesn’t know who they were or what they’ve been through. Fine men should be remembered properly.
Sometimes you don’t always catch the things life throws at you. Sometimes it’s not your fault that they slip through your fingers. That’s an old saying my mother used to say before she passed on.
I recon I missed something special.