In 1896, I came into this world, born into a picturesque village in West Sussex.

Growing up I spent my youth picnicking on the fields with friends and going on fishing trips with my brother, Charlie, in the stream behind our parent’s house.

At eighteen, I met Alice. She was a ploughman’s daughter and the beholder of my heart.

 spent many Spring afternoons courting her as we strolled together through green landscapes dotted with yellow flowers of the season.

Life was bright and vibrant, yet no more so than the light that shone from Alice’s eyes during those treasured days.

We planned for a Summer of companionship, but before we could fulfil such promises our lives were uprooted by the announcement of war in Europe.

Surely enough, I was conscripted by the King’s men and pulled away from the only world that I had ever known, before being rushed to the front. Gone were the days of reckless abandonment, of laughter, and of light.

Of Alice’s hand in mine, and of mine and my brother’s fishing trips. In place of those green havens that I took so much for granted growing up was now a world of ashen ground, hard as stone, backed by bleak, grey skies.

The only sight that stands out against these vast and empty lands are dark, painted silhouettes of barbed wire and the dead tangled within them. Amongst these dread-infested trenches, where lice have made accommodation of our uniforms, feeding themselves handsomely on the blood that pumps through our starved bodies, it becomes clear to us all that God has abandoned us.

As the rats feast on the corpses of young farm hands, fallen by chance of a shell's proximity, I come to understand that I may never see home again, I may never hold Alice in my arms at the altar, and Charlie, who was killed three weeks ago in no man's land, will never watch his son grow up.

Even if, by some hope against hope, I were to return to my little West Sussex village, to my family, to Alice, it could never be the same.

Not anymore. I am no longer a student, no longer a boy, no longer a brother, but a walking, living corpse; a killer in my own right.

The only distinction between me and the dead lying beyond our barricades is luck, nothing more. I no longer fear death and I no longer fear hell, because I am already there.

The echoing of the guns, of shells exploding around us, of constant bombardment from both sides soon drowns out into the background; as unnoticeable a sound to me now as wind blowing through trees used to be when I was a young lad back home.

Around me, young men with sunken faces gather into formation as worn-out ladders are raised against the trench walls. I think of Alice and the life we might have known together.

Nevertheless, the whistle blows and we charge forward.

Written by Robert Smith, from Basingstoke