The Caucasus sky was shrouded in low, gray winter clouds, as though they were pressing down on the earth. They hung so close that it felt as if they could be touched from the bottom of the trench. The morning air bit into his skin, while the rain seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for the moment to fall.
Şehsuvar rubbed his hands together, then blew on them. His rifle hung from his shoulder.
Beneath the planks stretched across the ground, stagnant water mingled with mud and rotting earth. The smell kept rising, stinging the nose of anyone who stood there too long. When winter came, the cold air caused the stench to settle more heavily on the surface instead of rising as sharply as it did in summer. But after spending months in the trenches, Şehsuvar had lost the ability to hate it.
War taught people to grow accustomed to things that should never have been considered normal.
Once someone joined the military, the training camp slowly destroyed their image of ordinary life. After that, war did the rest.
Some soldiers cried themselves to sleep while praying they would be able to go home soon. Yet when the sun rose the next morning, they would wake, pick up their rifles, and stand watch again as though a war that refused to end were an ordinary part of life.
For days, even weeks, they huddled at the bottom of the trench. They ate and drank without appetite, slept among mud and corpses, then sought a little peace by caring for the stray cats that prowled between the trenches hunting rats that stole their rations.
No one on the front line knew when any of this would end.
Not even Enver Pasha, Minister of War of the Ottoman Empire, could answer that.
The Western Front. The Eastern Front. The Caucasus Front.
The fires of war had spread too far.
It had all begun on June 28, 1914.
In Sarajevo, a Bosnian Serb nationalist killed Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with his wife. A month later, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.
The Great War had begun.
The Ottoman Empire eventually sided with the Central Powers alongside Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria. On the other side stood the Allies: France, Britain, Russia, and the other nations that would later be dragged into the conflict.
At the beginning of the war, both sides believed everything would be over before autumn.
They were wrong.
Autumn passed.
Winter arrived.
And the soldiers were still in the trenches.
Before being sent to the Caucasus Front, Şehsuvar lived in Köprüköy, a small town in the Erzurum region. He helped his father at the family barbershop. His life was simple. Each day was filled with the sounds of scissors, razors, customers' conversations, and the scent of soap lingering in the air.
Then war came.
Gunfire echoed in the distance. Köprüköy became one of the battlefields in the fighting between Ottoman and Russian forces.
Before long, Şehsuvar left home.
He never truly returned.
Now his days were spent taking down enemies who entered the sights of his M1903 or operating an MG09 when Russian forces tried to break through the defensive line.
When he killed a Russian soldier for the first time, his body shook violently.
He thought guilt would destroy him.
It didn't.
What came instead was emptiness.
The longer gunfire raged around him, the farther his feelings drifted from his own body.
The crack of rifles.
The boom of artillery.
A burst of machine-gun fire.
Screams.
Orders.
Everything blended into one long sound that slowly erased the sounds of the world.
In the end, a soldier no longer even knew whether he was still hearing anything or merely imagining the sound of his own breathing.
Şehsuvar still remembered one night when an enemy soldier broke into their trench.
He brought the man down with a stone.
Once.
Twice.
Then again and again.
When the stone was no longer enough, he drew his knife.
When it was over, Şehsuvar stood beside the man's body and stared at his own hands.
There was no fear.
No regret.
Nothing.
That was precisely what frightened him.
Because he knew that when someone killed another person on the battlefield, it was not only the victim's life that ended.
A part of the killer died, too.
And that part would never return.
But war didn't care.
The next day they attacked again.
Then retreated.
Then attacked again.
A sea of blood was spilled just to move the front line a few dozen yards.
Most battles ended in a stalemate.
Modern war was different from every war their parents' generation had ever described. The sheer amount of gunpowder, the weapons in use, artillery, machine guns, vehicles, and aircraft made the battlefield feel like something humanity had never known before.
Even death came from the sky.
Sometimes cannons malfunctioned and rained shells down on their own troops. On certain days, aircraft dropped bombs from behind the clouds.
If Şehsuvar had known all that before enlisting, he wasn't sure he would have remained a soldier.
Maybe he would have fled to Switzerland.
A neutral country.
A place with no reason to shoot anyone.
But now it was too late.
Şehsuvar leaned against the edge of the trench.
The boards and hard earth pressed into his stomach.
His stomach churned.
Every morning was like this.
Because when light began to appear on the horizon, the gunfire began as well.
He raised his face to the sky.
Then something moved behind the clouds.
A black shape slowly emerged.
Şehsuvar narrowed his eyes.
It was too large to be a bird.
Too strange to be an aircraft.
And for some reason, seeing it made the bad feeling that had been only vague until then suddenly become real.
Something was coming.