I met him on my second day at the front. Hans was German, but he spoke enough English for us to understand each other. He shouldn't have been there—none of us should. Hans had sunken eyes, as if they carried the weight of the world, and hands that trembled at the touch of a rifle. He didn't look like a soldier; he looked like a farmer torn from his land, just as I had been torn from mine.
We were placed together in a trench, separated from our enemies by only a few meters of mud and death. In that claustrophobic space, where the stench of decay was as strong as the smell of gunpowder, we started talking. Not out of friendship, but because the silence was unbearable.
"What did you do before this?" I asked.
He hesitated before answering.
"I grew potatoes. You?"
"Corn. My father used to say the soil knows more about life than we do. Now, looking at this…" I gestured to the desolate landscape around us, where bodies and debris were indistinguishable. "I think he was right."
Hans nodded slowly, as if chewing over my words.
"My grandfather used to say the earth keeps everything: the dead, the living, the secrets. Maybe that's why it feels so heavy."
In that moment, I realized he was like me. Not a German, not an enemy, but a man trapped in something we didn't understand. We started talking more, always in whispers, as if we feared the war might hear us and punish us for being human.
"Do you believe in God?" I asked one day, as the sky exploded above us.
He smiled, but it was a bitter smile.
"Not anymore. I think if He exists, He must have closed His eyes to what we're doing here. And you?"
"I think God is like us," I replied. "Too fragile to face what we've created."
Hans laughed, but his laughter quickly faded.
"You know, I've been thinking… What if this war isn't ours? Not the generals', not the kings'. What if it belongs to the earth? Maybe we're just killing each other so it can survive."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Look at what we do. We turn everything into weapons: the iron we take from the mountains, the fire we steal from the sky. Maybe the earth is tired of us. Maybe it started this war to silence us."
His words stayed with me. Not because I believed them, but because they gave this madness a strange kind of logic. I started noticing the bodies around us, men who had screamed, cried, begged for their lives. Now they lay in the same mud that held us up. Germans, French, English—there was no difference. All of them returned to the same earth.
One night, as the sound of shelling seemed more distant, Hans asked me:
"Do you think we're the same?"
"All of us?" I asked in return.
"Yes. You and me. Us and them. The living and the dead."
I thought for a moment before answering.
"I think so. But it's like we keep forgetting. It's easier to hate the other than to admit we're the same."
Hans nodded but said nothing. We sat in silence, listening to the wind carry the scent of war.
A few days later, he was hit by shrapnel during an attack. I stayed by his side as he bled, trying to stop the wound. He gripped my arm tightly and said:
"The earth is taking me now. Promise me you'll remember this: war is always a crime, even if they try to call it a necessity."
I nodded, my throat tight.
"I'll remember."
When Hans died, it felt like something inside me had been buried with him. Perhaps my faith in what we call humanity. Perhaps my own soul.
And it was in that moment, looking at his body, that I realized the cruelest truth of all: war doesn't create victors. It only makes us equal in death.