And just to lay with you, there's nothing that I wouldn't do, 'cept lay my rifle down.

All those traits which in me I abhor
Just make me want to hold you more
And slipping from my icy grasp
Is your attention, gone too fast.

The wind cut over the trenches today but brought no essence of fresh freedom wherever it had happened from. In the trenches we strained for that evanescent scent of home, knowing that stretching up for it could be the end for us but not caring.

I know that there is no point in fighting, that we'll be here forever. But we already have been, as if we'd been earmarked by war's red bloody hand the moment we'd drawn our first breaths. He stamped us with a thumbprint on our foreheads that hearkened us back to the trenches where we run around, alike the rats, with the rats.

I miss. Everyone misses. Misses their Missus. And some go mad, some run away, some do all sorts of things rather than admit that boredom and trench foot slowly moulder under the oppressive purple sky, sometimes lit with bolts of patriotic fire that seems to crush ever closer onto us. It's like we're living in an unsanitary vacuumed tunnel, where there is nothing but all too much of something like mould and status quo and patriotic grit make us rub against each other and yet never tear and fray, not to each other, not to our pals.

There is nothing new or surprising anymore. It is all fight, die, live, fight again, hospital, die, live. A game of probabilities. I miss her. I miss being me.