Passchendaele
He had seen other soldiers slip off the duckboards and fall, and he knew he had to stay calm, because it was serious. Still, his first thought was that it felt good to be off his feet for once. Shells burst overhead and he lay in a deep crater, standing rainwater lapping over his legs up to the belt, his pack sunk deep into the mud.
"Hey!" he shouted. The guns went on blasting, far above. He could see the boards up there shaking as other men crossed them -- hadn't they seen him fall? The sun was bright enough to cast their shadows down into the dimness of the crater, but only as flickers of a deeper darkness. It was impossible to see the men themselves. He tried to rise again, but the equipment strapped to his back was too heavy, and he felt like a flipped-over tortoise. He thought of a story he'd once read in an adventure magazine. The story was about an expedition in the Congo, and in it one of the native bearers had stepped in quicksand. There'd been an illustration of him, white eyes rolling in his black face, panic in every stroke of the pen. He remembered the explorer shouting at the poor sod to stay calm, stop struggling, they'd toss him a vine. He hadn't listened and the quicksand had taken his struggling body and his heavy pack before anyone could get to him.
The world went slow around him; the gunfire spaced and spread out, each shot a deep echo of itself. He tried to wriggle his arms out of his pack, but the mud shifted under him and sucked the pack deeper into itself and he had to stop, gasping, his heart hammering faster than the guns. The water was up to his armpits now and moving fast, and he scrabbled in the mud underneath him to try to find the buckles and loosen them, but his fingers were numb with fear and the water that was cold even in August and the mud was moving again. A picture came into his head of his mother, standing at the door of her wee white house and clutching the telegram they would send her, and he sobbed aloud. We regret to inform you...
"Help!" he cried. Still the boards rattled overhead, too far for any good of it, and the guns kept sounding slow and deep. The water kept rising, or he kept sinking, and above the circle of the sky was no greater than a tarnished coin, glowing nearly white from the clouded sun. A clot of soaked earth floated past his face and his neck ached from the strain of pulling up, trying to keep his chin above the water. No one had seen him fall. No one could see him sinking. And if he kept sinking into the mud... His mother came to him again in her faded wash-dress, still with red eyes clutching the telegram; this time, though, it was Last seen August 5th, 1917 in Flanders outside Passchendaele... believed lost... believed lost...
Something gave way under him and the water came suddenly up over his head. He screamed and the water bubbled in his mouth and with one last try he strained upward, breaking the surface, but the mud still held him fast. The water closed before his eyes and he turned his face up to the sky, pleading, his eyes filled with tarnished grey-white light and he couldn't breathe, there was only so long he could hold his breath, and he prayed Please someone find me but he knew there wasn't much hope.