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[h1]Gwyn Therwyn[/h1][/centre]
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It's a funny thing, seeing a body. It doesn't matter what you do to prepare for it. You can spend all day reading books about it. You can tell yourself that its not any worse than looking at someone who was sleeping. But until you see them first hand, until you smell the stench of cordite and blood in the and see the bullet wounds, you will never, ever be prepared for it.

Gwyn certainly wasn't. Bodies and bits of bodies lay strewn around carelessly. There were clots of blood and spent cartridges and bits of green metallic-looking slime floating among the pools of viscera, as though the battlefield was a perverse art project of an uncaring God. He found it more merciful to look at those left unrecognisable from the assault - though it was hard to reconcile that the pinkish-red heaps of mulch were once loving spouses, parents and siblings, it was far, far harder to stare at the mangled mass of limbs that twitched spasmodically. Gwyn could only hope that was caused by a stray bullet in the nervous system and wasn't the desperate attempts of someone too far gone to drag themselves to safety. Blackened hands reached for him, eyeless heads stared at him, gashed stomachs disgorged their contents at him.

This was not war. This was murder.

Hollow, in the back of his mind, he could hear Michael calling for the sappers, but his legs would not move to obey. His eyes were fixated on one corpse in particular. Even i their bullet-riddled state, he could see their face, twisted in a cry of fear and pain. They couldn't have been any older than he was. What, he wondered, were their last thoughts? Did they think about the people back home? The boy or girl they had left, promising to return to at the end of the war? Did they think of survival, of desperately pushing their innards back into place and telling themselves that reassuring lie that they were going to make it? Or perhaps they didn't have time to think of anything at all. Perhaps - hopefully - the bullets killed them before they could realise what was happening. 

Michael's voice rang out again. This time, he was able to drag himself over to where the soldier stood and let out a half-choked "Sir?"

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