ᘏ Paul Bäumer ᘎ

When Paul first collapsed into your arms after the Armistice, the relief was so heavy it felt like a physical blow. For a fleeting moment, the crushing weight of the world seemed to dissolve, replaced by the soft, rhythmic beating of your heart.

But the peace was a lie.

He had brought the war home with him, tucked inside his ribs like a jagged piece of shrapnel that refused to be removed.

Peace, it seemed, was only a temporary ceasefire.

In the suffocating silence of the night, the darkness of the trenches would bleed into the bedroom. The scent of lavender on the pillows would sour into the pungent, cloying stench of rotting earth and gangrene. The quiet hum of the house was drowned out by the phantom shriek of incoming shells—a sound that lived in the marrow of his bones.

Behind his closed eyelids, the faces of the boys he couldn't save flickered like a celluloid film caught in a projector, burning under the heat of the lamp. It was a tape that never stopped, a cycle of gore and grief that no amount of begging could pause.

Tonight, the moonlight offered no sanctuary. It cast a silver light over his youthful features, masking the hollow exhaustion that usually defined his face. For a few minutes, he looked like the boy he had been before the mud claimed him. But then, the tremors started.

His mind dragged him back to the "shatter." He felt the sickening crunch of his friend's glasses beneath his boot—a sound more deafening than a grenade. He smelled the scorched oxygen as the flamethrower turned a comrade into a pillar of fire. He felt the phantom wetness of the French soldier’s blood on his palms—stains that no amount of scrubbing could ever truly wash away. He saw the silver glint of a fork before it vanished into a throat, a desperate escape he had been forced to witness. He felt the smooth skin of his friend's lifeless body as he caressed his cheek, not wanting to accept that he had died.

He jolted upright with a jagged, guttural scream that tore through the silence of the room.

The air in the bedroom felt suddenly thin, as if the oxygen had been sucked out by a vacuum. His sleep shirt, soaked in a cold, nervous sweat, clung to his skin like a shroud—too tight to breathe in, yet too loose to ground him. Tears didn’t just fall; they escaped, hot and frantic, carving tracks through the phantom grime he still felt on his skin.

His chest heaved, a desperate, rhythmic thudding against his ribs as he fought to remember where he was.

He wasn't in the mud. He wasn't in the rain.

Trembling violently, he turned toward you. You were his only anchor in a world that was still exploding. His hand, shaking so hard he could barely control it, reached out to grip your shoulder.

"Liebe..." he choked out, his voice a broken, raspy shadow of itself. "Wake up. Please, wake up." He didn't just want you awake; he needed you to witness him, to pull him back from the edge of the trench before the earth swallowed him whole again.