Can't concentrate today

Can't concentrate today

fiction
edward w pritchard

Can't concentrate today. For no good reason I keep remembering what happen at Verdun France in 1916 when I was a soldier in the French army.

Jacobs had lost his wedding ring and kept frantically searching our section of the trench looking for it. It was time to go over the top to charge the German army, the whistle had sounded twice. Jacobs was responsible to secure the short wooden ladder to the side of the trench wall that our group would rush up and over and into no man's land bayonet's drawn in less than one minute. No one spoke but I had to rasp at Jacobs to get to his duty, my throat gets very dry before a charge.

Jacobs complied. As we ran toward the enemy Jacobs looked over at me and implored me to help him search for the gold ring his wife had given him should we get back to our same trench. It was not uncommon for a charge to fail because of machine gun fire or bombardment and for a unit to be happy to dive back into the same trench they started from.

I lost track of Jacobs and he was killed a few days later. Maybe five days after I heard Jacobs had died I was in retreat with another unit under murderous bombing and I was flung to the ground by an explosion. There was a man's arm laying on the ground near me. It was severed about four inches up the wrist, and the hand was clinched in a death grip but I am sure it was Jacobs ring on the second finger. It had some unusual markings that Jacobs had shown me once when we were drinking behind the lines a few weeks ago; and there was the Jacob's wedding ring laying in the mud stuck on a detached hand. I couldn't tell if it was a Frenchman of our unit who had stolen the ring or a German soldier who made a lucky find off a dead enemy. I was injured that day by that explosion and when I came to later I was behind the lines in an open air field hospital. I tried to explain to the orderly and later the Doctor about Jacob's ring but they weren't listening to me and my throat was very dry so I couldn't explain myself well. The orderly eventually swore at me to shut up because he was very busy moving us wounded soldiers because a storm was coming soon. I remember the clear smell of the incoming rain storm because it was so much different than the normal odors of a field hospital.

Sitting here at my desk, twenty years later in the property tax department near Nancy, France about 30 miles from where Jacob's died and the wedding ring disappeared, sometimes now, before a storm; I remember trying to figure out what side the soldier fought on who had Jacob's ring on his finger. Once about five years ago I took my son out to the battlefield where we used to fight in the trenches in WW1 but my young son had to help me back to our car. My throat got very dry and I felt about to faint. I saw a lot worse things than a severed hand with another man's wedding ring on it when I was a soldier in the French army at Verdun, France in 1916 and usually I try not to remember them.