The morning after the first battle of Passchendaele, 1917.
The dawn broke over a field that was not a field anymore, but a forsaken place where nothing lived but the dead. The earth was scarred, torn open by shellfire, its wounds filled with water and blood and the broken bodies of men.
They lay there, splayed out like some grim harvest, their faces turned toward the sky, blank and unseeing. The living moved among them with a slow, weary tread, as if they walked in the land of shadows.
The sun, a weak and dying thing, strained through the thick clouds, casting long, broken rays across the mud and the ruins of the world.
In the distance, the skeletal remains of trees stood like mourners, their branches reaching to the heavens as if to ask why.
But there was no answer, only the silence of the fallen and the soft, relentless drizzle that wept for what had been lost.