Dead on the Western Front

By Matthew Buza

It feels as if God has abandoned his children to fight in the mud...

The names are all different, but they all mean the same thing...

Trench Walkers
Eaters
Crawlers
The Dead

Beneath the Western Front, the 189th Tunneling Company digs its way across one shovel full at a time. Will a set of secret plans help tip the scale? Or, will they have to contend with more than just the Germans? There are walkers out there. And their own trench scum. How will they cope when they see their once dead brothers looking for a piece of the action?

Steel and teeth cut equally.
Blood flows all the same.

Where is the meaning in this world when you're trapped between the roar of the lead racket and the moaning cries of blood lust?

Prepare to be...Dead On The Western Front

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthew Buza
• Release date: Jul 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223892885

Book preview

Dead

...on the Western Front

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By

MATTHEW BUZA

Copyright © 2023 by Matthew Buza.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For information contact: www.matthewbuza.com

Book by Matthew Buza

ISBN-10:

ISBN-13: 

First Edition: January 2023

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Thank you for taking the time to read my book. I hope you enjoy the journey. Please visit my website to sign up for my mailing list and check out my other books. I wish you the best.

I aim to share my writing with as many people as possible. I continue to publish and will continue to share my work with you. I’m in this for the writing and have made my books pay what you want. That means you can download anything I write for free. If you’re feeling generous, there’s a suggested price. I appreciate your support. Happy reading!

www.matthewbuza.com

My writing often contains violence and language. If you are sensitive to this type of content, please consider before you continue to read and review. If this work were to be made into a movie (USA), it would be rated R.

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Dead...on the Western Front

By: Matthew Buza

It feels as if God

Has abandoned his children

To fight in the mud

1.

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Some die only once 

Others, I have found, may live on to die again

But in this tilled earth, in this boiling soil 

We repeat what we fear

Cycling, bursting, only to wilt and decompose

To experience the willful life

A smooth, featureless meaning

The reborn are trapped in an eternal cycle 

Of folly and pain 

Of fresh meat layered on decaying bone

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Warren put the chewed pencil in his worn leather handbook. He waited in the rain with the others.

Over the wall, the drenched landscape was a lead racket, fat with greed and sour from waste. The green world had been tilled clean and replaced with a thick plaster of clay and mud. God’s little fingers pressed dimples into the ground between long, scarring trenches through once fertile soil. A pitiful evening fog blanketed the already dead wasteland, where ghoulish moans filled the air from the dead and dying. 

A week before, on a similar raid on a similar night, they had captured a young Bavarian, dragging him across the zone to beat him to a dark shade of purple. After a melee of punches, a few lost teeth, and a pint of blood leaving various cuts on his face, the young man spoke of plans. The Bavarian thought his offer of information would spare him from his fate. But in the end, there was only one fate for an unregistered prisoner. He was to die in order to be born again. 

According to the Bavarian, somewhere across the narrow distance of putrid filth was a notebook filled with a map of German tunnels under the front. It told of depths, dimensions, and diagrams for future expansion. The information was a goldmine, and the translator fumbled with his words, struggling with wide-eyed glee. 

Because of the German’s confession, Warren had been pulled from his digging crew and thrown into the rain-soaked trench. Warren was a tunneler, spending his day’s dozens of meters below the most feared ground in the world. But more importantly, Warren knew what to look for when they raided the enemy’s trenches. War and fighting were new to him. He had never seen a bullet fired in anger or a man blown to bits. He was a tunneler. But the glum realization that he was the most expendable from his tunneling crew didn’t rest well with him. Others had seen action. Others had gone over the top. But they chose him. He was right. If something happened this night, they would find another kid to work the shovel.

Warren was lucky to have seen the Bavarian before he was sent to the stockyards for specialized training. Warren stood at the back edge of the assembly with the tunneling crew in front of him. Warren watched the terrified young man babble at the translator. His face leaked, and his lips quivered with fear. The small chair flexed with his willingness to share. He was an exemplary prisoner. The officers looked at the tunneling crew and then back at the Bavarian. They conferred quietly.

The Bavarian mumbled, Nicht der tod. Nicht...nicht... He looked at the officers and then at the tunneling crew. The yellowed snot exploded off his lips with every word. "Niche...no...no dead. Bitte. No dead. Bitte!"

Warren couldn’t help but follow the Bavarian’s screams along the trench until the sound of moans called on the wind. Like all prisoners, they had taken the Bavarian to the stockyards to be turned into a lifeless corpse and ultimately trained to hunt the Hun he once called his own. Warren knew this. Every man knew this who lived on the front. It was an open secret that both sides were complicit in. But they were all dead men, in the end, were they not? Whether it was from a sniper bullet, shell, fruitless charge, or a late-night raid. They were all dead men, some more than others. 

On the front, the kidnappings were the worst. When the stocks of meat eaters ran, low one side would come. They always came. Swooping in late at night to pick off some unsuspecting man with a rag of chloroform to the face. Another future eater taken. What would they say in that letter home? We couldn’t have the families know the truth. They wouldn’t believe it anyways. 

We regret to inform you that your son is missing in action.

There were other ways they filled the stocks. Whispers of wounded men taken into the nightmare.

Yes! Believe me, the boy was going to die. His intestines were on the table there in a mess. By God, that’s all his blood on the floor. He was ashen! I could hear the death rattle. Why not give him a chance to fight once more for God and Country? We’d all take that chance! Wouldn’t we?

Warren shivered.

The men all knew it. But it would be bullets to their heads if they were caught inciting mutiny. Because mutiny it would be. If the world only found out you were turning dying men into meat eaters, there would be hell to pay. The eternal sensibilities of scripture would send waves of good mothers into a blood lust as they stormed parliament and oiled the guillotines. No, they wouldn’t know. That would be something the soldiers on the front would quietly keep to themselves. No secrets are revealed as long as we can carry an extra bullet in the pocket, just in case. That bullet would protect them from the walled evils that locked them in the front. Every man knew that fate. It was easier to eat a bullet instead of turning. For God and Country, once! And only once!

There was a structure to the evil on the front. You don’t have an entire apparatus training the creatures as weapons and not have that knowledge spread to the leadership. How the royalty and politicians still had their heads was a shock to any frontline man. But then again, there was the Hun just a few meters away, using Brits and the French as undead war dogs. Warren knew all of this. And now, just over the ramparts, was a young Bavarian chained to a post and snarling like a dog as he gnawed on the bloody stump of a German man’s leg.

Once, and only once.

Warren chewed on the pencil’s edge. The tips of his fingers shuddered with fear, and a light convulse rose to Warren’s throat. He felt the smack of bile on his tongue. The pencil went away as the men shuffled around him. The air was cold, and it nibbled at his neck.

He resettled quickly. In Warren’s left hand was a smooth oak cricket bat with thick rail nails protruding through the end. The tips were scratched and dented from earlier raids but still sharp. A small revolver rested on his hip, and a grey storage tin was strapped to his waist. Warren’s uniform was soaked through. He wanted to move, sweat, run, and do anything other than stand in the trench, even if it meant running through the hell just over his shoulder. Warren flinched at the distant thud of shells. A sharp report from a nearby maxim stopped all of the side conversations. It was as if they wanted to let the Brits know they were still awake and waiting. Each man felt the danger like millions of tiny sewing needles pressed into his skin from every direction. It was a suffocating hell filled with thick swarms of lead and the randomized touch of death, both quick and slow. Warren feared it. Every man did. And if they said they didn’t, they were lying. The one difference was that Warren was a tunneler. Yes, a soldier, but a tunneler first, a man of the spade. 

Chalk up, A voice spoke.

Burnt cork had been passed around. Warren rubbed the black powder over his face and arms. It was gritty and smelled of a campfire.

One minute.

The raiding party was seven deep. Two men wore belts strapped with Mills bombs and held bats similar to Warren’s. The rest were armed with long daggers, wire cutters, and Enfields strapped over their shoulders. A raiding team’s primary weapons were hand-to-hand and silent. They couldn’t afford to use a gun unless they got pinned down.

Warren gripped the bat and played with the nail edge. The numbness was back. He pressed the finger deeper into the metal edge. Nothing. This was the worst time for the anxiety to reappear. He gripped hard, feeling the wood grain in his palm. It’s just the fingers, he told himself. Just the fingers. Then the rush came, sharp needles, sensation, touch. The fingers cried out, and he clumsily dropped the bat into the mud. He picked it up and wiped the slop off the end. He caught a whiff of the rancid trench mixed with the wet wool of his uniform. The static pain grew in his stomach, and he felt sick. 

The sewer rat looks nervous, one voice mocked. You better keep up. And watch out for them chompers. When they get you, it’s fast. But don’t worry. We’ll put you out of your misery before you turn.

Another soldier bit down with his teeth with a sharp click.

Don’t worry, he’ll find a hole to crawl into. Tunnelers like to be underground.

We’ll all be underground soon. Pissing an eternity away in this hell hole.

He’s going to die so fast. Jesus, why did they bring him?

He’ll drop his bat halfway there. You just watch.

The voice came again, Enough. Ready yourselves. Silent movement. Stay quiet, and you’ll find them sleeping in their beds, dreaming of their big-titted mütters.

Sulfur and death drifted over the edge of the trench. The seven men spun around and jumped onto the fire step. Two wooden ladders clung to the wall. Overhead the white fog drifted downwind. They watched the muddy lip like men at the edge of the world, waiting for the command to go over the top and fall into the blackened abyss where monsters and men were indistinguishable.

Ready, men? The only sound was rain pattering off the steel brodies, then a single word barked out, Godspeed.

They silently scrambled over the ladders and out into the flat mud plateau. 

When you live so long below the ground, the flats overhead held a mystic quality. It was Warren’s first time over the top, and it was nothing short of exhilarating. When the heartbeat that hard, the mind was unable to process if that moment were good or bad. It was a night raid, small and tight. Only seven of them going over. But the darkness seemed to close in the scope of their actions. It made everything intimate and personal but no less dangerous. He had heard stories and seen the bodies stacked on the train cars. But to be there for the first time was something new. 

The wind rippled past Warren’s face. It had been thirty seconds since they left the trench, and Warren hadn’t taken a breath yet. He gasped. Sulfur and rotten flesh were everywhere. It smelled like an open grave.