I needed to explain out my thoughts before I could write out what I've meant to say from the start. Here it is, stripped of meter and unobscured by metaphor:

In 1914, when the Christmas lights burned brighter than the stars, the carols echoed from
the trenches. We forgot about the war. In "no mans land," he showed me a picture of you,
his wife. It was remarkable how much you looked like mine. That night we talked in
fragments and shared cigarettes. It wouldn't be accurate to say we became friends, but
we did exchange addresses so that we could visit and write if we both made it out of that
damned war alive. But down the chain of command, fraternization, over night, became an
act of treason. I didn't think much of it until I saw him emerge with a white flag. As he
smiled and walked closer, I screamed "Go back!" My commanding officer must have
heard me, because he turned his gun on me and said "You're the one who will shoot. If
you don't there won't be one widow, there will be two." At first, I shot off to the right,
hoping that he might get scared, but he kept coming closer waving a letter. I said a prayer,
wished that everything leading up to this moment had never transpired, and then I pulled the trigger.
The pain never seems to fade. On a reconnaissance mission, a week later, I managed to snag the letter, which warned us of an air-raid and offered us refuge in their trench.

I'm not writing to ask for forgiveness from you, because after all this time I am still unable to forgive myself, and since the day that I killed him every second has been a hell where the pain never seems to fade. A better world must be possible. Another world must be possible.