Trench

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” Tolkien famously wrote. He claimed the word was Anglo-Saxon, but Tolkien served at the Somme, and every soldier in the trenches knew about hobbits. Little creatures, like men, you’d glimpse in the corner of your eye.

Some said, if you saw a hobbit’s face, you’d die soon. Others, if you saw one running away, you’d die. Or if you stopped seeing them, you weren’t long for it.

Graveyard humour, y’see? We were all going to die. Until the War ended.

But they did like holes in the ground, everyone agreed on that.

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Image credit: Imperial War Museum. The Battle of the Somme, 1916.
This story first appeared on Crap Mariner’s 100 Word Story Challenge in March 2015.