He could feel the ground shift beneath his feet as he peered over the wall of the trench. He didn't look down. No-man's land was a haze of smog and dust, twisted metal heaps and razor-sharp wire peering back at him through the thick air. He adjusted his position in the trench, feet uncomfortable and wet. The spaces between his toes burned with some infection, but still he didn't look down. Every time he stopped and considered the reality of where he was, every time he looked down over the brass buttons on his greatcoat and the dirtied straps of cloth on his boots into the sodden earth of this little world, his trench, he remembered. He remembered his comrades, his home. He remembered humanity and compassion. Heavy bolter fire rang out from the enemy earthworks not a hundred yards away, flinging muck into the air around him. He ducked his head down, now face to face with that floor of the trench. Bodies. A macabre carpet of prone figures lined the trench, nameless corpses that served the Emperor in life as soldiers and now in death as grisly floorboards. Most were submerged almost completely in the mud, buried in the detritus, but some, the fresh additions, still possessed features that were distinct and identifiable. The men he stood on now were people who a few short days before had stood alongside him. Now he manned this stretch of line alone.
He reported to his lieutenant every day at midday. Without a full complement of troops defense was impossible. His lieutenant, the eternal kind of officer that was present on every battlefield, old, grizzled, eyes of steel and balls of brass, knew it, had always known it. But orders were orders, and the will of the Imperium would not be denied because of a simple thing like impossibility.
He heard the high pitched whine of artillery shells screaming out of the sky like angels become demons, indignant and protesting their fall. He huddled further into the side of the trench, pushing himself into a small hole in the side of the bulwark that served as his sleeping cubby. The impact of heavy mortars rattled his brain inside his skull and his skull inside his helmet. The explosions tossed earth into the air as if it were cotton floating in the wind. He stared at the corpses, some now pulped by the artillery fire into masses that were men, and thought again of home.
He had been raised on an Agri-World, high tithe. His father owned a small plantation where fibrous plants like flax and cotton were raised and then shipped to a manufactorium and integrated into polymers. The materials that made up the greatcoat draped around his shoulders could have come from fields his father labored over if it hadn't all been destroyed in the civil war. Ten years of hard fighting. Millions dead. First his brother went off to fight out of devotion to the Emperor. Dead. Then his father went, as some sort of revenge for his son. Dead. Then he went, and survived the last two years of the conflict. That proved to be a step-up for him when it came to further service; no regiments could be raised from such a wasteland, so he was integrated into a new regiment from another planet, another system. No experience in the fresh troops, troops that now lay in front of him. Not much of home in that life. Not much of home back home, though.
The shells pounded on.