It's night. The blackness is absolute. The only light I see is that reflected from the eyes of the rats scurrying past my head. The only sound is the unsteady breathing of the men around me and the occasional whimpers as the horrors we see each day replay in gruesome detail in the privacy of their dreams. That, and the rats, as they skitter across the floor of the dugout, nibbling at our bedding and bodies, pissing in our food. Not that it matters. The rat urine might make our food softer and more edible, or at least more nutritious. Certainly the rats are the only things out here profiting from this senseless slaughter of ours.

I shift and fidget, trying to sleep. It's too quiet. Over the months I've grown accustomed to being sung to sleep by the sounds of death. Gunshots, grenades, the screams of dying, the tears of the lost. The sudden winter has temporarily brought us what months of fighting could not: peace. Heavy snow fall has trapped many men inside their dugouts and filled the trenches, as well as No Man's Land, with thick, heavy, deep drifts of icy whiteness. It's hidden everything. Our scant paths to the others in the trenches, the barbed wire clinging to the ground, hidden explosives, the bodies of our dead. No one wants to venture out now, not when the terrain is even more unpredictable than usual. And so, for the moment, we have irritating peace and quiet, broken only by the sound of our furry associates committing their own acts of war against our survival.

The ground is rock hard and icy cold beneath my cheek, almost freezing it at the slightest touch. I wish I had a pillow. It might make sleep come easier. But I returned from days of bloodshed to find rats had gnawed away at it and the rest of my bedding, clearing out holes so they could use the army's blankets and pillows for nests.

Something huge and greasy slides past my nose and whiskers tickle inside my ear. Small claws prickle on my cheek and then there's nothing but the coldness and the darkness again.

I wonder if that rat was sleeping in my long-lost pillow.

With the fighting stopped, it's like there's nothing left. I was taken from my home to fight for my country and if I'm not fighting, why am I here?

We were all taken from our homes and families and it's like when we were taken, we left behind our souls too. Now we are merely dead bodies, animated, but no less dead than those who fall around us every day. We make no jokes, not those of us who have been here for more than a month. Our food is inedible, but we don't care, for we don't need to eat. We don't care about eating. Half of us throw up the contents of our stomach daily anyways, even if there is nothing there to begin with. We don't make friends. Some of us came with friends. I think there were people I called friends, once. Many of us were separated when we first arrived, sent into different units. Those who remained with me quickly became corpses. Two, besides me, continue to walk and talk, but we're all corpses. We may have been friends when we were alive, but now we don't know each other any better than we know the man who lies on the earth with one of our bayonet's through his chest.

Sometimes, letters come, from the world of the living. Letters from people I think I must have known, once. They come with sweet, worried words, blessings, sometimes gifts of real food, or warm clothing. It's odd that they always seem to be for a stranger who bears my name. Perhaps that's why I can't sleep.

The dead don't need to rest.