BB Grey–musings

Inspired by All Quiet on the Western Front and the Christmas Truce of 1914

---

The trench exhales a stale, unreal air,
Thick with rot, a shroud none can bear.
Wet drips from noses, a ceaseless fall,
Chapping lips erased by war’s cruel thrall.
A book lies torn—pages shred and weep,
Their whispered tales too frail to keep.

Silent Night hums through the frost-bit night,
A fragile thread ‘twixt birth and blight.
Voices rise, both friend and foe,
From muddied depths where death bells toll.
Kings awaited, crowned in vain,
Never come to ease this pain.

I press my spine to a mud wall cold,
Feeling centuries gather, sudden and old.
Recoil, I fold, a crumpled plea,
A promise lost—no dawn to see.
The earth is damp, a grave’s embrace,
Each breath a scar upon my face.

Is it summer where you lie asleep?
Beneath the soil, so vast, so deep?
Tell me soft, and I might hold
A fleeting warmth ‘gainst winter’s cold.
The fight digs trenches in my soul,
A weeping wound no time makes whole.

Then—Christmas Eve, nineteen-fourteen,
A stillness falls, a rift serene.
From sodden dark, we climb, we dare,
To meet in No Man’s Land, stripped bare.
Carols drift, “Stille Nacht” takes flight,
Two tongues entwined in sacred rite.

Gifts exchanged—buttons, bread, a smoke,
A fleeting laugh where silence broke.
A football kicks through frost and mire,
A truce unscripted, born of fire.
Enemies stand as men, not foes,
In candle-glow where mercy grows.

But dawn returns with iron roar,
The truce dissolves, the cannons soar.
Back to the trench, the stench, the dread,
Where dreams decay and hope lies dead.
Yet still I hear, through blood and din,
Silent Night’s echo—peace worn thin.

---