HOLY BARRICADE #2

Holy Barricades Along the trench lines of the Trench Cossacks rise barricades unlike any raised by engineers or sappers. These are not built for speed or convenience, but assembled with care and intent from what the faithful can carry under fire. Great and small icons are bound together with wire and timber, crosses driven into the earth like stakes, sandbags packed tight around splintered relics and broken fragments of shrines pulled from ruined villages. What cannot stop a shell is asked to stop fear. Each Holy Barricade is a wall of prayer as much as matter. Icons stare outward through smoke and mud, faces cracked, paint flaking, yet unturned. Bullets chip wood and splinter frames, but the images remain, watching the no man’s land beyond. Men swear that incoming fire hesitates, that shells burst just short or long, that fragments turn aside at the last moment. No officer records such claims, but none order the icons removed. The Cossacks do not believe the barricades are indestructi