Atmospheric writing round two - 6R

To improve even further on our atmospheric writing from last week, 6R have been 'hugging' a sophisticated passage from a book set in WWI, modifying it while keeping the meaning and the overall tone. Here is James' version.


He lay, unable to move, on the crumbling tunnel floor beneath the foreign fields, but still he hadn't reached death. He felt soil drowning his eyes and dusty nostrils, and a mass on top of him. Trying to move his rigid limbs, he felt himself pinned to the dying earth, as though it had coiled around him in weighty, comfortable blankets and was luring him in with the promise of eternal sleep. The fading sound of the explosion bounded from corner to corner like a bullet flying from gun to heart. He pictured the exit to life sealed off; a spark of panic lifted in his belly, but was extinguished beneath the mass of his motionless state.


The imprisoned sound finally died out.


He listened for it to be substituted by the regular noise of the soldiers' screams, of those whose limbs had been blown from their place or whose brains had been cruelly removed from their skulls. He heard nothing at first, only silence. Then, as the last pieces of displaced soil settled in the gloomy tunnel, he heard a long thick sigh; it was an irregular sound, but he knew that it was the noise of dozens of men decaying simultaneously.