Tag: Death Ray

#6 Private Killshot and his Hyper-Sonic World War I Death Ray

| November 6, 2011 | 0 Comments

 

 

“At one moment, you are crouched next to a fellow soldier, huddled in the trenches, shivering in the cold European snow.  You turn your body for a second to fetch a cigarette from your satchel, or to check the clip in your rifle when you hear it, a subtle electrical buzz muffled beneath the heavy winter air.  Then you smell it, the smell of burning hair and rotting teeth.  You turn back around to see that the soldier sitting next to you, the man whose name you hadn’t even bothered to learn yet,  has been reduced to a pile of smoking ashes.  As the black and silver flakes float off with the wind you slink even lower in your hole, pressing your back even tighter against the sand bags and dirt, you then begin to curse him aloud: that damned American, that damned Private Killshot and his Hyper-Sonic Death Ray…he is single handely turning the tide of this war…”

-Erich Maria Remarque
a lost passage from
All Quite on the Western Front

**Translated from German