The Last Thoughts of the Damned

We were studying World War One in English last year and we had to write an account of someone who was going to be shot for cowardice and I thought I'd post mine here. So, here it is...


The Last Thoughts of the Damned


The dark. The crushing, suffocating darkness with not even a candle to stave off the thoughts and demons conjured by a tortured mind, filled with blood and death and suffering. Perhaps for the best. Flickering, twisted, evil shadows cannot be seen without light.

But I know they’re there, I know they’re still there, stalking me, watching, waiting for me in the hell where youth and laughter go, where there is no escape, not even death for death will have long gone before me.

The ravings of a tormented soul, they say, but it is nothing but truths. I see them every time I close my eyes, every time I fall unwillingly into a fitful, restless sleep. Their blank, staring eyes, watching, watching, always watching, watching without seeing. Their mutilated bodies long dead yet animated by the force of their inner strength, by their hungering desire for revenge. Their rotting hands, blue flesh peeling from the fingers of lifeless men, reaching for me, all trying to drag me down to the depths from which there is no return.

I betrayed them and they are coming for me. They died so I could live, but they did not go willingly and so they are coming for me. They died in agony so a coward could hang onto what remained of his tattered life, empty and broken like a bird that can no longer fly and they are coming for me, hunting me. I am trapped inside a living death, seeing their faces contorted with hatred everywhere. I am living a lifeless life.

But not for long. There’s a matter of hours to go, mere hours before I stand there and I look at those soldiers, look at my former comrades, look at their guns all pointing at me and they look back with contempt in their eyes and murder in their hearts. But over their shoulders I can see a far more terrifying sight. Seen only by the damned, by the condemned, by the traitors are dead men, corpses, standing, looking watching, waiting. For me. I will join them, nothing more than another bullet-ridden body, rotting and mouldering, whilst my soul is taken by them. There will be no Heaven for me, above the clear skies of England, no feelings of satisfaction and a job well done as I breathe my last. There will only be an eternity of agony in the fires of Hell, the gaping maw of evil to swallow my traitor’s soul. Death will not be the end of my torment. Death will be the beginning.