#Lance Corporal Schofield

[jackharkness]

1917 (2019) - dir. Sam Mendes

[kenobihater]

happy fog of war friday

[lexxieannie]

wasted like half of my summer tryin to hold on your hand

[schos-in-the-field]

"In a sieve they went to sea".

some of my favourite screen caps from my recent rewatch of 1917

[frunbuns]

Fortesa Latifi, “The Truth About Grief”

[pedroam-bang]

1917 (2019)

“Time is the enemy.”

[syltaxerror]

Trying to convince my friend to name their chinchilla Schofield and their dust bath “German bunker”

[wouldtheybecomeafearavatar]

Would Lance Corporal William "Will" Schofield from the movie 1917 become an avatar of the Slaughter?

[1dr1nkpa1nt]

here are a few of my doodles recently

sorry i died lol

[kenobihater]

1917 - sam mendes & krysty wilson-cairns / go to the limits of your longing - rainer maria rilke

[lexxieannie]

the war is no place for boy best friends 😔

[schos-in-the-field]

Cherries. Lamberts. They might be Dukes, hard to tell when they're not in fruit.

What's the difference?

Well, people think there's one type, but there's lots of them. Cuthberts, Queen Annes, Montmorencys, sweet ones, sour ones.

Why on Earth would you know this?

I planted a cherry tree :)

[frunbuns]

Schofield’s Wound Stripe

“Blake heaves him to his feet - his uniform is identical to Blake’s, same rank, the only difference is the brass wound stripe on Schofield’s left sleeve.“

“A wound stripe is a distinction of dress bestowed on soldiers wounded in combat. It was typically worn on military uniform jackets.”

“The award of a stripe to soldiers who had been wounded during the war was authorized by Army Order 249 of 6 July 1916. This order allowed those who had appeared in a War Office casualty list to sew a two-inch stripe of gold Russia braid onto the left sleeve of their service jacket.”

“Officers and men reported ‘wounded – gas,’ or ‘Wounded – shock, shell,’ are entitled to the [WOUND STRIPE].“

BLAKE: Was it like this before Thiepval? 

The name does something to Schofield. Fear clings to him. He pushes it away. 

SCHOFIELD: I don’t remember.

BLAKE: You don’t remember the Somme?

SCHOFIELD: Not really.

“In August 1916, coincidentally a month after the massacres on the battlefields of the Somme, the British Army began issuing wound stripes to Allied Soldiers and Officers who had been wounded in combat or campaigns since 4th August 1914″

[milscie]

I had to draw some of my favorite sad gays once again!!! It’s been a while but I really liked how these turned out!

[starvingdelusions]

This song. This damn song. Is just so painfully beautiful.

[schofieldshelmet]

Even When We’re Gone

Ao3

A/N: Hellooo! This is my first 1917 fic so. Please be nice lol (Also, the fic title comes from one of my favorite songs, It Goes On by Sir Rosevelt and Zac Brown Band) Anyway, I started writing this fic to deal with the horror Scho must have gone through climbing out of the river and getting stuck briefly in the bodies, and then it spiraled from there. So enjoy :P

Bodies.

Damp and rubbery and rotting beneath his palms, rolling in the water, tangling between his legs. Tripping him as he stumbled desperately through the shallows, splashing and sinking and tumbling over the corpses of men and women and children, their skin swollen from the river. Their eyes stared up at him, empty and black, their faces stretched and gray and sagging, lips pale and torn like paper.

Get out, get out, he had to get out–

The overgrown riverbank seemed miles away, just out of reach of his desperately extending fingers. The bodies clung to his calves and ankles, gripping his skin with decaying flesh, pulling him down, down, down into the cold and crushing deep—

“Lad?”

Sunlight.

Grass. Sharp beneath his splayed fingers.

Blue sky stretching over his head, flecked in wispy clouds.

Cool air on his skin. Fresh, not bloody and rotted. Clean, not tinged with smoke and ash.

He is dimly aware of sucking in rapid breaths that don’t quite fill his lungs.

(In, out. In, out. In, out).

Breathe.

A hand on his shoulder.

He jumps, blinks, jerks backwards all at once, banging his elbow on the tree behind him. (The same tree under which he and Blake’s fate was sealed, less than a week ago).

“Sorry, corporal. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

A face swims into his vision. Schofield coughs, pushing himself out of his slumped position and fumbling with the laces of his boots. “No harm done, Sarge.”

His fingers shake as he knots the cords together. Sergeant Sanders’ hand is cold through the rough fabric of his tunic, a gentle pressure against his shoulder that grounds him to the earth. “Excited to go on leave soon?”

A choking sensation grips Schofield’s throat, constricting his air flow. “Yes, Sarge.” He sits back and picks at the bandage on his left hand, worn gray cloth concealing his injury from view. It’s healing, slowly but surely, even after a bloody carcass and muddy river water and rotting flesh beneath his palms.

(Some other things refuse to heal).

Sergeant Sanders sits cross-legged on the grass beside Schofield, following the corporal’s gaze to the spring-green field beyond. “Pretty, innit?” At Schofield’s belated nod, the sergeant continues, “Hard to think that all that beauty is out there, and then you go back in the trenches only a couple hundred yards away.” He pauses, gaze flicking to Schofield again. His words are stilted, awkward, tripping over each other. “I…know you’ve had a rough go of it. But it doesn’t do to think about it too long, do it? That’s the secret to survival out here.”

Schofield gives him a haggard look, remembering the Captain who had told him the same thing as he was about to depart for Écoust-Saint-Mein a week ago. He had tried not to think about it. That was something he had learned after the Somme, after the bombs and the blood and the decaying limbs plastered against the earth like broken branches.

It was easier to forget when thousands of others had the same experience as himself, when the men who fell screaming beside him were people he didn’t know firsthand.

(But when he knew them personally, and their blood was soaking into his hands with a metallic, heavy scent, and their voices were laced in terror that he could practically taste in the air, it was hard to forget).

(When the bodies were fresh and rotted beneath his palms, when the blood had congealed on the riverbank in a crusty stain, when their skin was loose and sagging from the water, it was hard to forget).

(When his hand plunged into the soft and meaty carcass of a soldier blown open by a bomb, when the intestines squished beneath his torn and bleeding fingers and the dead man’s face was pasty white, it was hard to forget).

(When it was just him, alone and desperate and frightened in a world of smoke and ashes, when the fire singed his skin and the yells dragged against his ears in the dark, it was hard to forget).

“Corporal?”

Schofield pulls himself out of the reverie he had tumbled into like a shell crater and glances at Sanders again. The sergeant is looking at him expectantly. “Did you ask me something, Sarge?” His voice is faint. He digs his fingers into the grass and reminds himself that he is not a corpse.

“You know not to think about it, don’t you, lad?”

Yes, he does. He’s known since the Somme, since the fields washed in blood that made the ground slick beneath his feet, since the bodies strewn across the grass like ash.

He tells himself every hour of the day not to think about it.

(He thought he had gotten used to death. It was just something he had learned to accept, because those who didn’t accept it never got very far).

But minds have a way of playing tricks on people.

So do hours of traveling alone, terrified and carrying the weight of the world on one’s shoulders. Bearing the burden of the dead, and the fate of the living, as he stumbled through the dark.

“Yes, sir. I know.”

Sanders’s lips twitch upwards in a half-smile, and he claps Schofield on the back. “Good lad.” He pauses, looking like he wants to say something else, but then shakes his head and gets to his feet, brushing dirt off his trousers. “Keep pushing forward, corp, one day at a time. That’s how you’ll make it through the war.”

“Yes, sir.”

Footsteps recede through the grass. Schofield rolls his lips together and sinks lower against the tree, eyes dropping to the position a foot or two away where Blake would have been lying had he been here, helmet tilted over his eyes and hands folded across his stomach, probably snoring a little in the afternoon sun.

Tell her I wasn’t scared…

Schofield draws a slow breath through his nose, flicking his gaze to the sky and focusing on the puffy clouds floating there. He lets his fingers lace through blades of grass, exhaling air again from his mouth.

(In, out. In, out. In, out).

Breathe.

He tilts his head back to rest against the tree trunk, eyes glazing over. He has yet to write the letter to Blake’s mother, explaining her son’s final wishes and reassuring her that he was not alone in his final moments. He can’t quite bring himself to compose it yet, to relive Blake’s anguished screams, the blood soaking through his tunic. Ever since he returned to the 8th Battalion, he’s blocked the memory from his mind, focusing instead on making it through each day, second by painful second.

(The other soldiers watch Lance Corporal Schofield with wary expressions, noticing the way he sits alone beneath that same crooked tree, barely deigning a nod or a smile to those who pass by. They think he’s snobbish, stuck-up, too good to fraternize with the other men. They know little about him, save for the fact that he is always quiet, always alone. Always looking out into the wild field beyond with a vacant countenance.

And they know he was one of the few among them who endured the Somme, who managed to make it through the bloody madness with his sanity, though fragile, still intact. They know he was one of the two men sent on the most recent hellbound mission, that he went out as part of a pair, stoic and somber with fear in his eyes, and returned alone, silent and haggard, with something akin to grief permanently etched on his features.

They claim to avoid him because he is haughty and aloof, but deep inside they are afraid of the haunted expression that clings to the corporal who sits eternally alone. They are terrified of the emptiness in his eyes).

Schofield swallows, digs his old blue tobacco tin from his pocket, fumbles with the faded pictures inside. Through all his years as a soldier, through the tears and the mud and the bombs and the barbed wire, these pictures have kept him sane, have kept his traumatized mind from slipping into a pit of insanity.

He brushes calloused fingertips over the faces in the pictures. Someday he’ll get to tell his two little girls about Blake, about cherry trees, about a gentle hand guiding him through tunnels he was unable to see. Someday he’ll get to tell his wife how Blake’s vivacity sometimes reminded him of her, his relentless optimism in the face of death. Someday, when the war is over and he’s with them again, not stuck in these dark and muddy trenches that have become frighteningly like home.

(He’ll see them soon, but not for long. And they’ll watch him go with tears in their eyes, not knowing if they’ll ever see him again).

Schofield tucks the pictures back in the tobacco tin with a reverent lump in his throat and refastens the lid, then sits with the tin’s light weight in his hands and looks out across the field.

The sun is setting, and the sky is pink and gold.

There’s a smell like cherry blossoms in the air. Schofield smiles and closes his eyes.