New Year in a Ukrainian trench
The sun rises on 2023. Its rays light up the trench, an unwelcoming black void into which we gratefully disappear to take cover from the artillery, rockets and Iranian Shahid drones that are launched daily from the Russian positions just kilometres across the water. All around, the landscape is ragged and torn. This is the emergent topography of southern Ukraine, a land sundered by violence. Nearby, a cat wanders across an expanse of concrete — unperturbed by it all.
To enter a trench on the frontlines of a war is to go both deep into the earth and back in time. I arrive as the war enters its ninth year, just before New Year’s Eve; the mood seems strangely familiar. Inside the sleeping quarters, at the end of a narrow corridor strewn with coats, shoes, helmets, and automatic weapons, a line comes to me from Isaac Rosenberg’s great First World War poem, Break of Day in the Trenches. We are, I realise, now “sprawled in the bowels of the earth”…
