I met Johnny on the first day of basic training. From the get go I knew we were as different as chalk and cheese. I’d been built for this, for war. For killing. Heading to the frontlines on the mainland was just the fulfilment of my purpose in life. Johnny hadn’t been built like that. Barely eighteen years old, straight out of the slums of Dublin. His auld fellow had been locked out in 1913 and still worshipped the ground Big Jim Larkin walked on. Johnny had wanted to join his dad in the Citizen’s Army, but his mam was stuck home with three girls under the age of ten. Somebody had to bring some money in, and jobs weren’t growing on trees in Ireland. Especially if you didn’t want to be a scab. So Johnny signed up with the Army, got landed with me in training, and then they shipped us off to France.

From the moment we met we were inseparable. Two peas in a pod. Every training exercise, every crawl through mud and barbed wire, every hour of target practice, we were together. Johnny liked to wax lyrical about home, about how brave his dad was defending striking workers from the police, how Connolly and Larkin were going to drag William Martin Murphy out onto the streets and give him the hiding he well deserved. Sometimes, he’d talk about other things too. Only when the officers were out of earshot, and never in front of the English Troops. With the other Irish, and the Scottish too, Johnny would whisper about Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, about the men of Wexford beating back the Redcoats, and how the time was coming again for the Irish to rise up.

“Ireland unfree shall never be at peace” he’d say. His dad had heard that once at a funeral, apparently, and said it every morning first thing. Like a mantra. Or a prayer. I kept silent while Johnny dreamed of revolution and heroism. Politics, imperialism, rebellion; none of it mattered to me. Johnny was focused on training so he could help raise the Tricolour over Dublin some day. All I could focus on was putting bullet after bullet in my enemies. Who those enemies were was inconsequential. It wasn’t that I wanted to kill. Not really. It was more like I had to kill. The Army made me a weapon to send forth and help win the war for them. So I just sat there, without a word, and waited for the next trip to the shooting range as Johnny imagined what his Irish Republic would look like.

The training they give you when you sign up doesn’t cover half of what war really is. There’s a reason War is the first Horseman of the Apocalypse. It comes, and from it all evil flows. Men kill each other on the battlefield. They shoot and stab and strangle each other until the other side all lay broken, mangled, and dead at their feet. The second Horseman comes in the trenches. Famine. Those men were starved. Not just for food, although their sunken eyes and hollow cheeks said they were plenty starved for a good meal. What they really needed was a peaceful life, the kiss of a sweetheart on their cheek and the laughter of children in their ears. The trenches of the Great War were barren with a famine of the soul.

Third comes Pestilence. Disease, however, goes beyond the gangrene festering in bullet holes and shrapnel-filled wounds. Beyond the cholera floating in the drinking water with the blood and the shit. A battlefield is a breeding ground of disease for the mind. Some lost themselves in the boom of artillery and the smell of decay, became shadows of men. Others gave themselves to the bloodlust, revelled in the killing, more animal than man. Killing was a job for me, a function. For those sick souls, it was a pleasure.

Finally, Death. The end of all things. War, Famine, Pestilence. They all pave the way for that final horseman. Flesh rots. Heartbeats stop. Bricks crumble and iron rusts. Everything has its own end, its own death. Out beyond the trenches, Death had found his kingdom. No Man’s Land. Pockmarked and scarred by artillery fire, wrecked and ruined past recognition. Coated in a foul mess of barbed wire and flesh. Burning. Always burning. The smoke mixed with the mist each morning to lay over the battlefield and briefly hide the carnage with an ominous cloud. Dante’s description of the eternal Inferno pales in comparison to the horrors every soldier has witnessed since the Great War started. Hell is real, and it is nothing more than the sum of what men can do to each other. All of us here in Death’s Kingdom, we all cope in our own ways. Johnny dreams of his Irish Republic, I just keep thinking of the next shot I’ll take.

“Up and over the top” came the orders. It wasn’t lost on anyone that the men who decided it was time to venture out into No Man’s Land towards the enemy trenches were rarely the same men who actually ventured into the chaos to fight the Jerrys. Yet we still climbed up the walls of the trenches in the early hours of the morning, into the smog of war, and crept our way across towards the German trenches in the hope of catching them asleep. Typical of the Generals in their bunkers to assume the soldiers under their command are sleeping just as soundly as they are. Johnny and I kept creeping forward, and I could hear him singing lightly under his breath.

“Óró sé do bheatha bhaile, óró sé do bheatha bhaile, óró sé do bheatha bhaile, anois ar theacht an tsamhraidh…” he sang.

His singing faded as we saw it. The dark grey smog had begun to clear, but rolling in to replace it was a great cloud of vibrant yellow smoke. It flowed towards us, like a sentient wave, and it seemed as though there were tendrils within it writhing and twisting. It wanted to lash out, an eldritch horror, perhaps even Death himself, angry with our trespassing on his land.

“GAS!” someone screamed, and suddenly it was every man for himself back to our own trenches. Johnny and I stuck together though, just like we had since we met. The cloud of toxic gas seemed to speed up as we ran, chasing us as a hound gleefully hunts down and savages a hare. We could hear the coughing beginning behind us, the thud of men dropping to their knees and clutching their throats. It wouldn’t be us. It couldn’t be us. I had nothing to return to after the war, but Johnny had a family that relied on him. He couldn’t die here, choking to death on poison gas in a French field.

Just as the cloud reached us, we jumped over the barbed wire fence and down into our own trench. The gas was weaker now, but I could still hear Johnny coughing and spluttering beside me. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. All I could do was lay there in the mud. When he could catch his breath Johnny turned and looked at me, his face full of fear.

“I’m done” he said, “this isn’t my war and I’m done”

Then he got up and disappeared down the trenches, never even looking back. I wanted to call out, to beg him to come back and take me with him away from the pain and misery of this war. I had no voice though, and the only sound in the toxic air was the screams of the dying. That’s when they appeared. The Germans. All of them were wearing gas masks as they flooded down into our trench. One of them saw me laying there and picked me up out of the mud. Then, turning to his comrades, he spoke.

“Einer von ihnen ließ seine Waffe zurück” he said.

One of them left his gun behind.