Work Text:
There were whispers in the trenches. Whispers, that echo, passing from one battalion to the next, zigzagging down the mud-filled, miserable ditches that seem to have no end.
Never when outsiders or officers are near. Never written down in letters, sent home. Never when the weak sun dares to show it’s pale face through the eternal smoke. Whispers in the lulls between shellfire, in the darkness of night, when the men lay in their bunks, trying to ignore the cracks of gunshots overhead and the screams of the dying.
There are whispers of someone who arrives, when all seems lost, when the enemy is charging through the no man’s land and somehow is making headway. Someone who comes when rations are low, and all there is to eat are rats. Someone who comes when the fatally wounded cry out in pain, to soothe them, save them, make their passing peaceful.
If there is disease. If there is danger. If there is no way to escape. If the battle is nearly lost. If the supply lines have been cut off. If the commanders and officers are dead.
There is someone, who haunts the battlefields, coming and going like a ghost, a shadow.
Someone who speaks and drinks with the men, sparks hope and raises morale wherever they go, bringing laughter back to men entrenched in sorrow and loss.
They whisper that he’s an angel, who snuck out of heaven to help the wounded and the dying, the hopeless and the helpless.
They whisper of someone who cannot fall to bullets or shells, cannot be broken by the enemy’s interrogation, someone who bleeds like a man yet never falters, someone dressed as a private yet yells commands to the soldiers, charging in first in battle.
They whisper of someone who goes days without food so that others can eat, someone who leaps in front of bullets to save his fellows, someone who can shoot an enemy soldier dead from nearly a kilometre away, someone who risks his life to drag the bodies of the dead and fallen from no-man's-land, someone who can sing lullabies or curse up a storm.
The men whisper that when all is lost, the angel will come, coughing up blood, an eternal, never-healing wound in his side and burns peppering his skin, yet a determined spark in his green eyes that will spread to the rest of the troops like wildfire.
When all is lost, the angel will come.
When all is lost, the angel will come.
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There are very few who have met the angel and learned his name. The ones who do tell no one. They whisper the name to themselves like a prayer, a promise, because that is what the angel did.
In telling them his name, the angel promised that they would see him again, that they would return home some day.
Return home.
Return to England.