Page 53 - Wish Stream 2023 CREST

remainder of the platoon. Well, if I was unlucky for getting rained on the entire night, many others had worse fates: their trenches flooding from below after hitting the water table – poor sods.
Sometime later that day, it dawned on me that some of us were starting to lose the plot; sleep deprivation was setting in. Grumpiness, hallucina- tions, talking to the mounds of turf and in general just some strange chat. I turned my ears to hear drawn-out arguments about whether the num- ber of worms present in soil indicates its quality. I couldn’t help but thinking the worms wouldn’t have cared either way; they were probably more concerned that we were quite busy wrecking their homes.
The threat picture changed as the sun settled again; CBRN kit was to be donned in anticipation of an attack. The bulky kit actually kept us pretty warm – doubled with a nice dose of sleeplessness; I found myself learning to sleepwalk. It was odd,
for it wasn’t quite sleep; there was a maintained state of awareness, yet my body simply wouldn’t move until someone snapped me out of the trance. People found it quite funny, me just standing there, half asleep, tuft of grass in hand. I wasn’t the only one experiencing this of course, it was all starting to look like a scene from the Walking Dead and we had a long night ahead of us as we made the last push to finish our trenches.
And finally, the enemy came. Calls of “Gas, Gas, Gas” enforced the donning of masks. It was time to put our trenches to their intended use. We moved into the final night on edge, anticipating a full-scale assault at any moment. As if siding with the enemy, the storm kicked it up a notch; with heavy rain and
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