Whispering Spirits is a digital magazine which specializes in stores about ghosts, mythology and the supernatural. In Janurary 2007, they'll be releasing their first anthology of short stories, entitled "Orphans of the Storm," as an e-book, with the stories thematically similar to those appearing in the regular magazine, whose website can be found here.
My contribution to the e-book is the short story "Creeping Barrage", and is set in the dark and confusion world of trench warfare on the Verdun front during the First World War. A tactic favoured by both sides during this conflict was to combine their infantry assaults with rolling artillery barrages, supposedly to clear the infantry's path of enemy soldiers and emplacements. In reality, advancing in the wake of one of these creeping barrages was a very dangerous manouevre - advance too fast, and wind up being caught in the inferno of your own artillery; advance too slowly, and enemy forces will fill the smoky haze again before you could reach their positions.
The short story deals with just such an assault by an ill-fated French squad. Even as the protagonist surges out into the No Man's Land between the trenches in the wake of the bombardment, there is a creeping sensation that something is amiss on the battlefield... something more frightening than the enemy, something hidden in the thunder of the barrage... |
