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Creative Writing: The Assassin

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Like long lost memories, the gentle wind blew across the wide, empty fields. Long grasses swayed where snarled barbed wire and brandished bayonet had once been displayed and poppies died the guilty land as blood stains an assassin's hands. Between the endless lines of tomb stones a lone figure walked. His brow is furrowed and stern and his countenance unchanging as the ageless guardians who stand at attention side by side. His feet direct him along the rows of graves among the shifting shadows cast by the sinking sun. Now he pauses before a cross unmarked and undistinguished from its companions. Engraved within ageless face are the initials A.F. Harold stood before the cross, his hand raised in salute, his countenance in stone. After a few …show more content…

Our brave fighting over the last few days had created a bulge penetrating deep into the German front lines, flanked either side by occupied German territory. Despite our valour no real effort had been made by the army to follow it up and we had reached the end of their supplies. With no or little ammunition, rations or will left to fight he had no choice but to trudge towards our distant rest. Many men were bent double, like old beggars, under their empty sacks. The previous day's deluge had given the dry mud life and the sludge seemed to resist us with every knock-kneed step. We had begun our long march the night before guided by the haunting light of German and British flares high in the black night sky. Men marched asleep drunk with fatigue from our evening exodus and exhausted by fighting for days on end with no sleep. We were a pitiful sight, many were wounded with no means of medical help, some had lost their boots others strode on blood-shod, their trench feet oozing with infection and open wounds. As we struggled along we trod over the bodies of our fallen comrades who’d died fighting brave by our sides, now dismembered, blown apart by shot and shell, forgotten and unhonoured in the blood-soaked soil. The very soil for which they’d given their lives for and over which we now

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