Short Story: 'Lucky'

 by Daniel Sands

Saturday 23/11/1918

Why should I try to kill other people that have done nothing to me? For some important old people to stop ‘bad stuff’ from happening. I honestly don’t care if an Archduke of another country was killed. Why should that mean that I should shoot and kill people in some useless effort to-

And I was down. Shot by a German on the battlefield. I fell right into the mud of No Man's Land. It was around 07:35 on 1st July, 1916. It was one of the deadliest battles in the entire war: the Battle of the Somme. 300,000 deaths for a mere 7 miles of land. But, anyway, I digress. I was down, falling face-first into the ground and, luckily, that ended up being my ticket out of the war. Honestly, I was lucky I wasn’t killed.

I woke up three days later in a British hospital. In the meantime I’d had my leg lopped off at the knee, and it had been replaced by a prosthetic which was sitting on a bedside table.. I had been given a prosthetic because I hadn’t merely been shot, but the bullet went straight through my right leg. I sometimes wonder if it was that which woke me up, but I figure it can’t be because no one was there. Also, the prosthetic had already been fitted.

I haven’t ever spoken about this casualty before because I wanted to wait until the war had ended. And I haven’t got around to it yet.

All my friends were killed in the Somme. Completely blown up. I saw it with my own eyes. one single shell.