The Shambling Men

June 6th 1918

There were seven of us then. Across from me sat Dutch struggling to light his cigarette. His matches damp from the drizzle that had only just subsided. He was the only British soldier amongst us. He was a large able-bodied man, though perhaps a bit old. His bushy mustache looked to have started to grey at least a few years ago.

To either side of Dutch sat Poet and Moore, both French. They both looked alike with their pointed noses and curled mustaches. Though I never told them of this comparison fearing to offend them. Poet wrote in his book of jokes, originally thought to be a book of poems that he was dubbed after. Moore gazed transfixed at a small silver cross he spun between his fingers. To my left was Stitcher, also French. Unlike the previous men he was clean shaven. He was cleaning his spectacles with a rag. In his lap lay a book of medical practices. It would be concerning that he needed the book given he was the group’s medic had they not already known he could recite it front to back.

The rest of us were from the States. Irish, to my right, twiddled around with his knife. Though he appeared as young as I was, his eyes betrayed that he had already seen far more than I in his life. Despite this he seemed to hide a perpetual grin beneath his scraggly beard. He hummed some ditty to himself. It sounded familiar, but was likely horribly out of tune.

My gaze followed a rat as it made its way along the top of the parapet of the trench. It was bloated and massive, nearly the size of a fat cat. We’ve seen a few rats like this. At first we joked about them, but we all knew what they had been gorging themselves on. They had quickly become a far more horrific and depressing sight. Yet, far too common a sight.

“Johnny!” a shout called from around the bend in one of the communication trenches.

I stood and made my way towards the bend. There stood Captain, not an actual captain, but it’s what the rest of the group called him. He was still in charge of the other six of us, but I couldn’t actually name what rank he was. It’s not that I was never told, I just never seemed to remember. He was impatiently playing with his goatee as he waited for me to get closer. Next to him stood another soldier whose name I never managed to learn.

“Hurry, have you got yer film?” he asked impatiently.

“Oh, just here sir.” I responded as I fumbled to open one of the buttons to my pockets before pulling out a worn pocket kodak. I pulled out the roll of film and offered it to the Captain. He took it and handed it to the soldier beside him who grabbed it and offered me a different roll of film in turn. I slotted this roll into the camera before putting it away.

“Right, that’s all, I’ll be with you lot in a bit boy.” he said, turning to look in the direction of the reserve trenches. He gave me a pat on the shoulder before walking off with the other soldier. Making my way back to my spot I found the rest of the group where I had left them.

“It’ll be a quiet day I reckon.” Dutch murmured to no one in particular as I planted myself back where I had been before going to see the Captain. He took a drag of his cigarette which he managed to light while I was gone.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Fog’s rolling in. Can’t shoot nothin’ when ya can’t see nothin’.”

6 Days After The Fog

It's nearly been a week since that day, or at least we think anyway. Since the fog rolled in the sky stopped getting light and dark, it stayed the same muted gray through the fog. Watches have also stopped, making it hard to keep track of time. We started going off of our internal clocks, but it’s hard to tell how much that shifts day to day when we can’t discern day from night.

Not only has day and night become indiscernible through the fog but the trenches have also warped. We had the layout memorized, but now the trenches seemed to extend endlessly in all directions. Captain has been leading us South for the past couple days, he says that we should reach France eventually if we keep going South. Luckily compasses still work, so we know we’ve been heading South this whole time, doubling back only when blocked by dead ends.

Since the fog rolled in we’ve seen few other soldiers. The only other soldiers we ran into didn’t handle the situation well, and for one reason or another we won’t be running into them again.

While heading South we have consistently run into a bunker dugout. We come across it exactly once every 7 hours of our trek, give or take. The last two times we ran into it Stitcher kept track of time by counting away the seconds. According to him we come across the bunker about every 25,000 seconds.

The bunker itself is a small wooden and stone room built into a hole dug out next to the trenches. It was meant to store food,water, ammo, weapons, and various other supplies. Each bunker is identical to the last, and each time it is fully stocked. The last time we ran into it Dutch used a knife to carve a symbol into the doorframe to identify if it truly is the same bunker every time.

9 Days After The Fog

We haven’t seen the bunker in a few days, not since Dutch marked it. Irish and Poet blame Dutch for this. Though we had all agreed that we should do something to see if we are indeed coming across the same room every time. We ran into the room enough times to have gathered a decent stock of supplies though. Enough to last up to a few weeks.

Also in the past few days we have lost Moore. We didn’t notice when it happened. It’s hard enough to see the whole group through the fog, but Moore was always quiet. Not hearing from him for long periods of time was normal.

11 Days After The Fog

Strange noises can be heard coming from the fog of no man’s land. Guttural cries, chitter chattering, and something that sounds halfway through a warped bark and a cough. The sounds are far off, but that does ill to bring us comfort.

Irish, Stitcher, and I were trying to speculate what was making the noises, and what was happening as a greater whole. Irish believes what is happening is some type of divine intervention to stop the war and punish the soldiers for causing so much death. Stitcher was adamant that there was some sort of logic to it all that we weren’t seeing. Perhaps some new type of chemical weapon. I disagreed with them both. I believe they were trying to assign too much logic and reason to what was happening. I claimed that there was no logic or reason behind these events.

15 Days After The Fog

We came across something weird today, at least compared to our new status quo. A creature, something like a rat, but not. They were of a similar size to rats, maybe a little larger. They were hairless, and their snouts opened vertically to reveal a horrific mouth filled with teeth. They would run away if we ever got too close. Stitcher and Poet brought up that they looked like they were bloated from overindulgence like the normal rats had been.

That hadn’t been the only weird thing we saw in the past couple days. Recently the areas surrounding the trenches have been inconsistent with the areas that should have been present. So far we’ve passed through trenches that go through what looked like a desert with red sand. At another point the trenches brought us through what looked like a jungle.

17 Days After The Fog

While we were resting to catch our breath from our endless trek South Irish taught the group a shanty. It was about a crew that needed to abandon their ship because it couldn’t continue its voyage and its hull and cargo had begun to rot away. While the message was rather sullen it had gotten us to forget about the situation we are in, for at least a moment anyway. It’s the first time some of us have smiled, even since before the fog.

Poet has been uncharacteristically quiet lately. He was the only one to not partake in the merriment. Before the fog it was hard to get him to shut up at times, impossible at other times. Since the fog, or perhaps since Moore’s disappearance, he has grown increasingly quiet. Looking into his eyes it looked like he had left us long ago. They looked hollow and worn. He was a shadow of himself shambling along with the rest of us from stop to stop.

20 Days After The Fog

The sounds we’ve been hearing are the closest they’ve ever been. We even occasionally catch glimpses of shapes in the fog. Irish claims he saw what looked like a massive tendril reach into the sky. Captain says he thought he saw something like a series of poles reaching straight up slowly swaying in unison. Poet mentioned that he saw something, but we couldn’t get him to go into more detail than that. I’ve caught glimpses of things about the size of large dogs, but their general shape isn’t like that of a dog. They were more like something larger hunched over, but I haven’t seen it clearly to say so for certain. This has only reinforced my idea that we have all gone mad a long while ago.

25 Days After The Fog

Our number shrank again today. While we were resting Irish had gone off to piss. He never came back. Now it’s privacy be damned! If we need to go we’ll just have the others look the other way. Though even then who’s to say that when everyone looks back you’ll still be there. The noises have grown to the point they often sound like they are all around us. Whatever is in the fog could probably drag you off whenever everyone’s looking the other way.

26 Days After The Fog

We met another soldier during our trek today. He isn’t the first we’ve seen on our way South; we've seen a few others here and there, but he was the first one to be quite like how we found him. His uniform was unrecognizable, and his arm, or what was left of it, took Stitcher hours to bandage. Even then the bandages hardly lasted an hour before they had been fully soaked through. His arm and something he had said to me still haunt me.

“The shambling men are coming. They’ll come and make you a shambling man too.” It’s the only thing he would say, and he said it over and over. He had said it until he had passed out. Then he never woke up again.

Even now my mind lingers on what he said, and his dreadful arm. It was like he had held it in acid until skin and muscle were burned and scarred. The pain he must have been in could have known no bounds, and yet the only thing he could think of doing was ramble on about these “shambling men”. What did he mean by that? Was it something from the fog?

Something else troubling is that he came from the South. If we keep our heading we are sure to meet these “shambling men” that he had mentioned. We’ve spent far too long to alter our course now. Captain is adamant that France should have been to our South, so we’ll reach it soon surely. But that sounds like hollow hope, a delusion as we know not what else to do.

29 Days After The Fog

Today we found Irish. We had rounded a corner and there he was. What should have been a moment of joy quickly became one of confusion. According to Irish, he had been gone for no more than ten minutes. After he had finished his deed he had turned the corner we should have been and found it empty. He waited around there for no more than a moment before we came around another corner and found him. Had he gone mad, or perhaps the likeliest, we all have been mad for quite a while now.

Dutch doesn’t believe Irish. If to be as thick as thieves is to suggest two people are particularly close, than Irish and Duth are as thin as the law. Dutch, for whatever reason, decided to confide in me his concerns with the other group members. He said he didn’t trust Irish disappearing and reappearing as if none were the wiser. Dutch had also brought up how he thought Captain was clinging to the hope that we could still make it to France, that he’d sooner walk us to our dooms than give up his fantasies of salvation. Then was Poet, who was always so quick witted and had something to say about everything, but now had nothing to say about anything. According to Dutch, Stitcher and I were the only two to seem like we were still thinking straight. Dutch thinks it’s because I’ve been keeping my sanity by writing in my book and that Stitcher was too smart to go mad. I noticed that he failed to explain why he wasn’t going mad, but if he had I would have thought he was lying. Dutch is many things, but a liar is not one of them.

33 Days After The Fog

We now know what the shambling men are. Rather what they look like at the least. We can’t honestly say we remotely understood what we saw. To be honest I don’t even think the wretches we saw were even men at all. There had been maybe seven or eight of them huddled in a wider section of the trenches. At first we thought they were another group of soldiers, through the fog it was an easy mistake.

They were these horrible skinless things. Their bodies were composed of this bloodied, scarred and partly melted flesh. Skin almost completely stripped away or burned into the exposed flesh. Some of them were missing an arm or a leg. The one closest to us when we drew near was missing its lower jaw. They were all missing their eyes, endless black voids were in their place.

With what sanity we retained we gathered enough wit between us to turn tail and run. We ran until our lungs burned, and even then we kept running. I’m certain that not a one of us will be able to sleep ever again, lest we face those wretched skinless things within our nightmares.

39 Days After The Fog

We now know what that nameless soldier meant when he said the shambling men would make you a shambling man too. Poet died earlier today. Though we hadn’t known it at the time, Poet was touched by one of the shambling men. It was the jawless one I think, it had only taken a glancing touch, but it was all it took. Over the past couple of days the flesh had begun to burn away from Poet’s arm where the jawless shambling man had touched him. At first it was slow and easy enough to treat but the spread hastened with everyday.

Stitcher had given Poet a choice. He lacked the materials to do it properly, but he could amputate the arm. The process would kill Poet, but at least he wouldn't have to endure becoming one of those monsters, or at least he hoped that would be the case. Poet, who had been in growingly excruciating pain, accepted. Earlier today Stitcher performed the operation and announced Poet’s death. Before the operation Poet had given us a warning. He had said that the shambling men were getting closer, that he could sense them following our trail sleeplessly, tirelessly. They won’t ever stop following, it’s the only thing they know how to do.

44 Days After The Fog

One doesn’t know their own insignificance until one comes to face something that causes all other life to pale in comparison. We caught our first good glace at what’s beyond the fog, or at least one of the things within it. We will likely never truly understand what we saw. I, at least, am truly thankful for the limitations of the human mind. It was a mercy that our minds lacked the ability to coherently understand what lay beyond the fog. I am certain that if we didn’t lack the ability to understand what we saw it would have driven us further into madness.

47 Days After The Fog

For the past couple days we have been following a violet glow in the distance. It was the first light that we had seen in over a month, at least we think it's been that amount of time. We had reached the source of the violet glow to discover that it emanated from a cube wrapped in barbed wire which held it above the ground. It was small, any given side measured to about a foot in length. The glow emanated from etchings made into each face of the cube.

I had felt, no, Johnny had felt a connection to the cube. A desire to reach out to it had been planted within him. When he reached out to it the two of them came to understand the other. I no longer understand this connection. I wasn’t permitted to have those memories. This connection is likely what killed Johnny, he wasn’t compatible. But I do retain a sliver of understanding of Johnny’s final memories. Only the beginning connections that had formed when the two made contact. Johnny had felt the cube’s guilt and regret.

It was Johnny’s death that spurred my birth. I now have his memories, his face, even his mannerisms, thus why I took his book. It had brought him comfort, it now brings me comfort. I buried Johnny, it had seemed like the right thing to do. I don’t know what happened to his allies, they were gone by the time that I was born. I know not my purpose. All I know, as I sit here and write, beneath the rays of the sun that had been gone for so long, is that I am glad to have this borrowed life.