The Classified W.W.I. Trench Incident

Ugh, I hate Mondays. King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Swirl Bite? Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm. Hey, let's get back to work, please. But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites. Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm. King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites. There's nothing like it. There were hundreds of people on the platform, but it wasn't loud. It felt tense. Fathers and sons talking low. People forcing themselves to sound brave. The fog was thick and smelled of sulfur. You couldn't see the engine at the front of the train. You only heard the steam hissing out of it, cutting through the noise. My mother held my hand. She held it in my sleeve and didn't want to let go. Dry socks, she said. Two pairs. Always. I know, mother. And you write. Every week. Even if it's only one line. Every week, I swear. My sister Eleanor stood behind her. She was sixteen. She had been crying earlier and had stopped and was trying very hard not to start again. She held a tin in both hands. Her shortbread. She'd made it the night before. "Don't eat it all on the first day," she said. "I won't." We stood like that for a long time. Other families were doing the same thing along the platform. Mothers holding sleeves. A sergeant walked past us, blowing a whistle at no one. A porter shouted about luggage, then saw the pip on my shoulder and touched his cap. "Morning, lieutenant." A priest stood near the end of the platform, reading from a small book. The train was already there. It had been there for ten minutes. Steam rolled out from under the steel carriages. I kissed my mother on the cheek. Her skin was cold. "I'll come back," I said. "I swear it. This'll all be over before Christmas." She nodded. She didn't say anything. She only nodded and touched my face once and stepped back. I got into the carriage. I found a compartment with three empty seats and one man by my side. I sat by the window already asleep with his cap over his eyes. His boots were still muddy at the welt. I put my pack up. The rack was brass and cold. I sat down by the glass. The bench was horsehair, worn flat in the middle. My mother was there on the platform. Eleanor was beside her. They just stood, the two of them, very still, looking up at the window. The whistle went. The train jerked forward. My mother put her hand on the glass for a second. Just a second. Then she was gone past the window. Or I was. I watched the platform slide away. Then the station. Then the edges of the town. The warm faces faded. After that, there was only the cold steel of the carriage interior and the long gray morning and the wheels. I took out the little notebook she had given me. Took out the pencil. The cap man by the window didn't stir. I opened to the first page, wrote the date at the top and then: Dear mother, the train hasn't even cleared the station and I'm already writing to you. You'll laugh at me. I want you to laugh. I love you. I'll write again tomorrow. Arthur. The wheels have a sound. You don't notice it for the first hour. After that, you don't stop noticing it. Clack, clack, clack, clack. You start to breathe in time with it without meaning to. After a while, you dream in time with it. I slept sitting up that first night. We all did. The cap man by the window never moved. At some point he was gone and someone else was in his seat and I couldn't tell you when they changed. The glass was cold on my forehead. My breath left a wet shape on it and the shape didn't go away for a long time. Morning came slow. The country outside was still England. Hedges, low stone walls. A black and white cow standing in wet grass, chewing, watching the train. A boy on a gate waving at every carriage. I waved back and he couldn't see me, but I waved back anyway. A church spire in the distance. A woman hanging sheets on a line. All of it going on without me. Somewhere past noon we crossed at Folkestone and the train became a ferry and then another train. We were a different thing by then. No more civilians, just uniforms. Pack between the knees, rifle slung. The corridor smelled of tobacco and wet wool and the sour smell men get when they haven't washed in two days and are pretending they have. The second train in France was not a passenger train. It was a goods train with benches nailed into the carriages. It smelled of oil and old straw. The benches left splinters in your palms if you pushed off them wrong. The windows didn't open or close. They were just holes. The wind came in at the neck and went out at the ankles. I met the others properly on that train. Corporal Wheeler was from Leeds. A big man. Red hands. He had been out once already and been sent back for a bit after a bad leg. He talked the whole time. He talked like nothing could surprise him. He made the compartment laugh twice in the first hour, which I didn't think was possible. Private Hollis was 17. He said he was 18. He sat next to me and didn't speak for the first four hours. Then he asked me if I thought his mother would be alright. I said yes. Briggs was the radio man. He was older than the rest of us. 30, maybe. He hummed hymns under his breath the whole way. Abide with me, the old rugged cross. He didn't sing the words, only hummed them. A steady rhythm. I ate Eleanor's shortbread slowly. One piece in the morning, one in the evening. I meant to make it last a week. It lasted two days. I gave the last piece to Hollis without telling him where it came from. The country outside changed slowly and then quickly. First the green thinned out. The hedges stopped. Farmhouses stood with no roofs. Then whole villages with no one in them. The trees turned to broken stumps. Then the stumps stopped too. The ground went grey. Then brown. No grass, no road you could see. Nothing growing. Just churned earth, from one window to the other, all the way to the horizon. The smells changed too. Coal smoke gave way to diesel. Diesel gave way to gun oil. Under the gun oil was something sharp and bitter I couldn't place and didn't want to ask about. Briggs smelled it first and stopped humming for a minute, then started again a little quieter. Nobody talked much in the last hour. Wheeler had run out of stories or had decided to save them. Hollis was chewing the inside of his cheek. Briggs was watching the roof of the carriage and not humming anymore. I took out the notebook then. I had been writing bits all the way from the platform. Half a page here, two lines there. A description of a field. A joke Wheeler told about a sergeant and a horse. A list of the men's names so I wouldn't forget them. I had thought I would send a letter from every stop. I hadn't sent any. I didn't know where I could post one. I didn't know if any of it was the letter I actually wanted to write. I turned to a clean page. The pencil was blunt and I shaved it with my pocket knife and the shavings fell on my boot. Hollis watched me do it. I think he wanted to write one too and didn't know how to start. I looked at the page for a long time. The train slowed. Somewhere up the line a whistle went, long and tired. The brakes worked. Wheeler put his hands on his knees and braced to stand. I wrote fast. Not words, not a letter, just lines. Then the landscape. I wrote that faster. No hedges, no roofs, no grass. Brown, then grey, then nothing. Smell. Diesel. Gun oil. Something under it. I wrote one more line and underlined it twice. I couldn't tell you now why I underlined it. The earth out there is wrong. I closed the notebook and put the pencil behind my ear. The brakes hissed. I stopped once and stopped. Outside the window there were no buildings, just a siding and duckboards laid over mud and a sergeant on the duckboards with a list in his hand shouting names. I stood up. Hollis stood up after me. Wheeler went first out the door. That was when I felt it. It wasn't a sound yet. It was a feeling, a low steady shaking in the mud. Wheeler turned his head and said, quiet, almost to himself, "That's the guns." That was the first time I felt the guns. The communication trench cut deep into the ground. Three steps, four. Then you were in and the sky was gone except for a thin grey strip above you. walked single file, your shoulders brushed the walls on both sides. The walls were wet. My sleeve came away dark where it touched them. The air got colder the further in we went and it smelled of clay and wet sandbag. We went deeper than I thought a trench could go. We passed men sleeping in scraped out holes in the side of the wall. We passed a stretcher going the other way with a blanket over the shape on it. We passed a signaler crouched with a spool of wire working by feel in the dark. They put us in a dugout with timber beams across the ceiling. It was low. You couldn't stand up in it. You sat. You crouched. You lay down. There were four candles in it and eight men. The candles leaned. Wax had run down the beams and set there in yellow runs. The floor was boards over mud and the boards gave a little when you put weight on them. I put my pack in the corner. I put my hand flat on one of the timber beams. I could feel the guns in the wood. Faint. Steady. Under everything. I lit a candle from one of the leaning stubs and set it on a flat place on the beam. The flame didn't move. Eight men in a dugout and not one of them breathing out loud. I took the notebook out of my coat. I opened it on my knee. I wrote slowly. I wrote slowly so the pencil wouldn't tear the paper. Mother, I've never known a quiet like this. The earth itself is holding its breath. Ugh, I hate Mondays. Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm. Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm. Bites. Bites. Bites. Bites. Bites. Bites. Bites. Bites. Bites. The days had a shape. The front wasn't screaming and running. It was a routine. A terrible one, but a routine. That surprised me most. Stand two at dawn. Every man on the fire step before first light. Rifle up, staring into the gray. That was the hour the Germans liked to come, Wheeler said. So that was the hour we stood and waited for them not to. We stood there an hour every morning. My breath made a white shape on the metal of the rifle and the shape froze there and stayed. My hands stopped being hands after the first ten minutes. They were claws holding a rifle. The cold got into the nail beds and stayed there. I couldn't feel the trigger against my finger. I had to look down to check it was there. Then stand down. Then tea. If there was tea. The tea came up from the rear in petrol tins that had been rinsed out and not rinsed out well enough. It tasted of petrol. We drank it anyway. It was hot. That was the point of it. Then work. There was always work. Filling sandbags, shoring a wall that had slumped in the night, bailing out the sump at the low end of the trench with a tip. The water came back. You bailed it anyway. The water in the sump was the color of weak tea and it had things in it. Buttons, a broken spoon, a strip of leather I didn't look at twice. Trenchfoot took one of the older men in the first week. His name was Pike. I didn't know him well. They took his boots off and I saw his feet and I wished I hadn't. They carried him out. I don't know what happened to him after that. I kept my socks dry. I changed them twice a day. My mother told me to. I slept with the wet pair inside my tunic against my chest so they'd be dry by morning. They were never fully dry. They were warm and damp and smelled of skin. It worked. Not well. It worked enough. The guns never stopped. Not really. There were quiet hours and loud hours but there was no silent hour. You learned to sleep through the quiet ones. You learned which shells were for you and which were going somewhere else, two fields over, meant for some other poor bastards. You felt bad about being glad. You were glad anyway. The field telephone sat on a crate in the corner of the dugout. Box. Bake light. A cloth-wrapped cord running up the wall and out through a gap between two sandbags. The ring was a small tinny bell inside the box and it made you hear the bell ring. The ring was a small tinny bell inside the box and it made you flinch the first few times. It rang maybe twice a day. Orders. Weather. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes just a voice asking if we were still there. The voice always came through with a thin scratch behind it, like the line was being dragged along the ground. I'd answer. Still here. "Good," the voice said. "Stay there." Briggs had the wireless. A bigger box. Brass dials gone green at the edges. A headset with one working ear cup. He tuned it twice a day and wrote down whatever came through on a scrap of paper and passed the scrap to me. His handwriting was small and careful and leaned to the left. Most of it meant nothing. Some of it meant something. I nodded at all of it the same way. Hollis stopped saying he was eighteen. He didn't say he was seventeen either. He stopped saying his age at all. He ate when we told him to. He slept when we told him to. He wrote letters home. He showed me one. It was three lines long and said the food was good. The food wasn't good. I told him it was a fine letter and he should send it, and he did. Wheeler talked less than he had on the train. He still talked more than anyone else. He told me once, in the dugout, very quietly, that the quiet men were the ones to watch. The ones who stopped talking. I asked him why. He said, "Because they've started listening to something you can't hear yet." Then he gave a short laugh and didn't say anything else. I wrote every evening. By candle, on my knee. I wrote to my mother and I wrote to Eleanor and sometimes I just wrote to the page. I kept the letters in a tin I'd cleaned out. The tin had held tobacco once. It still smelled of it a little. I liked that. On the ninth night I sat down to write a proper letter. I don't know what made that night the night. The guns were quieter than usual. The candle was steady. Hollis was asleep with his mouth open and a little dried mud on his lower lip. Wheeler was playing cards against himself in the corner. The cards were soft at the edges and stuck together when he dealt them. Briggs was humming, very soft, "Abide with me." The dugout smelled of wet wool and tallow and the faint sour smell of men. The candle wax smelled of sheep. I put a fresh page on my knee and I wrote a long letter to my mother. I told her the truth, not all of it. I don't think you can tell all of it, but I told her I was afraid. I told her the afraid didn't go away, it just got quieter. Told her about Pike's feet, about Hollis' wrists. I told her Wheeler was a good man and Briggs hummed hymns and that I was glad I was with them and not with strangers. I told her I loved her. I hadn't said that in a letter before. I said it plain. I love you. I've always loved you. I'm sorry I didn't say it more when I was at home. I told her when this was done I wanted to come home and sit under the oak tree at the bottom of the garden. The big one. The one father planted. I wanted to sit under it and not talk about any of this. Not to her. Not to Eleanor. Not to anyone. I wanted to just sit there and listen to the leaves and drink a cup of tea she had made and watch the light move on the grass. I wrote that. I wrote it exactly like that. I signed it. I folded it. I put it in an envelope and I licked the envelope and the glue tasted of flour and something bitter. I pressed it flat along the seam with my thumb. I wrote the address. The pencil caught on a bit of grit in the paper and skipped once and I went back over it. I put it in the inside pocket of my coat, against my chest, next to the dry socks. I'd post it in the morning. The runner came at eight. I'd have it ready. It never got posted. The barrage started just after eleven. We knew the sound of a barrage by then. We knew the build. First, the far shells, two valleys over. Then the closer ones, walking in. Then the ones that were for you. You felt the ground change under you before you heard them. The mud started to shift and heave. This one was different from the first minute. It was heavier. It was faster. The shells came in groups of three and four and then more than you could count. Wheeler looked up from his cards and said, "Quiet. Get in. Everyone in. Now." He didn't shout it. He never shouted. We went into the deep dugout. The one with the double row of beams. Eight of us in a space, meant for six. Shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, I could smell Hollis' breath. Sour like old milk. Hollis was shaking. I put my hand on his shoulder. I could feel his collarbone through the wool. I don't know if he felt it. The candles leaned hard as each shell hit. The flames pulled sideways and straightened and pulled sideways again. Dust sifted down from the beams and gray lines. It got in my teeth. It tasted of old stone. The wood of the beams groaned. Not creaked, groaned. A long low sound from inside the grain. Then the sky changed. I saw it through the dugout door. A slice of it. It shouldn't have been bright. It was nearly midnight. It was bright. A sick chemical kind of bright. White at the edges and green under the white. And it lit the mud like a false daylight. Wheeler saw it too. He looked at me. He didn't say anything. His mouth was open a little. Briggs said, "That isn't ours." A shell landed close. I don't know how close. Close enough that the world stopped being a world for a second. The earth heaved under us and the beams above us groaned and dust came down in a thick curtain. Not in lines anymore. In a sheet. In a sheet. The pressure wave blew the candles out. All four at once. Not one by one. All at once. It was pitch black. I braced. I had my hand flat on the wall, on the earth. A slow shove against my palm. Cold clay pushing back. And then… The roaring stopped. Not faded. Not rolled away. Stopped instantly. Severed. There was no ring in my ears. There was no settling. There was nothing. I held my breath and listened and there was nothing. No guns, no beams, no breathing, no hollies next to me shaking. Nothing at all. The nothing lasted a long time. I don't know how long. Then someone struck a match. It was Wheeler. The match flared and his face came out of the dark in a small yellow circle and then went away again as he bent to the candle. The candle caught. It was not. The dugout came back one thing at a time. The beams. The wall. Hollis's eyes, wide and wet, fixed on the flame. Briggs on the floor with his arms over his head. The radio on its crate, my hand still flat on the clay. No one spoke for a while. We just breathed. The air was thick with dust. It sat on your tongue. It sat in the back of your throat and you swallowed it down and it sat there too. Wheeler lit the other candles one by one from the first. He did it slow. His hands were steady. I remember thinking that was strange. My hands. I looked down at them and they were shaking in a small, fast way and I put them under my arms to make them stop. I went to the field telephone. I picked up the receiver. The plastic was cold. I put it to my ear. There was nothing. Not static. Not the thin scratch. Nothing. I tapped the cradle. Said hello. Said it again. I put the receiver back down. Briggs was already at the wireless. He was turning the dial very slow with his thumb and forefinger. I watched his face. His face did a small thing. A pull at the corner of his mouth. He took the headset off and held it out to me. I put it on. There was a sound in it. It wasn't static. Not the kind we knew. The normal kind rolls and hisses. This was a low, steady grinding. A slow, turning sound, deep and far off. It had a rhythm. On and on. I listened for maybe ten seconds. I didn't say anything. Briggs didn't either. He put it back on and kept turning the dial. Wheeler went up the dugout steps. I went behind him. The trench was still there. That was the first thing. I'd half expected it not to be. But above the parapet there was no sky. There was a gray. A thick, wet gray. All the way down to the top of the bags. It settled on my face in small, cold beads. It had a taste. Clay and old iron. You couldn't see three feet past the wire. A fog had come in while we were under and it had settled and it wasn't moving. Wheeler waved a hand through it. The fog parted and closed. The same. He looked at me. He didn't say what he was thinking. I didn't either. We went back down. Briggs said, "They've used something. They've used something new." Wheeler said it was the shelling. Dust and chemical smoke from the barrage settling in the low ground. Briggs said no. He said you could see it in the color. He said he'd seen the gas reports. The French had lost two full companies in a gray like that two weeks prior. Nobody came out. No one argued after that. What Briggs was saying, what we were all starting to think but not saying out loud, was that there was nothing left on either side of us. That the barrage had done it. That we were sitting in the middle of a dead zone and sooner or later German mopping up crews would work their way down the line and find us. Hollis looked at Briggs and then at me and he was waiting to be told it wasn't true. I didn't tell him. I should have. I didn't. Wheeler said we'd send a runner. To the trench on our left. Find out who was still there. Get a line back up to battalion. I looked at the men. Briggs had the radio. Wheeler I needed. The two older men at the back were slumped against the wall and one of them had his eyes closed already. Hollis was sitting up straight with his hands on his knees. Hollis stood up. He didn't ask anything. He buckled his belt. He took the scrap of paper I wrote on. Two lines. Who's there? Telephone dead. He folded it and put it in his breast pocket and he nodded at me and he went up the steps. He didn't come back. Ugh, I hate Mondays. Uh, Taylor Hanson? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm. Bites! Ba-du-ba-dum! Bites! But Taylor Hanson- But Taylor Hanson's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites. Taylor Hanson? Nice! Try one. Mmm. Bites! Ba-du-ba-dum! Bites! Ba-du-ba-dum! There was no shot. I want to say that clearly. We listened. We listened for a long time. There was no rifle. There was no shout. There was no sound at all from the fog. Just the grinding in the radio behind us and our own breathing in the dugout. After an hour, I went up and looked. The fog was the same. The mud in front of the fire step had a single set of boot prints going out and no prints coming back. The heel marks were deep. The toes were deeper. He had been walking fast. I stood there and looked at those prints until the edges of them started to blur in the wet. Then I went back down. I wrote it in the tin. I wrote "Hollis is gone." I didn't write anything else about it. We waited. Time went funny early and I didn't notice at first. I'd look at my wristwatch and the hand would be where I'd last seen it. I'd look again later and it would be in the same place. I wound it. It kept winding. I held it to my ear. It ticked. I set it down. It didn't move. I set the rations. Half portions. Then quarter. A thumb of bully beef each. A hard biscuit split with a knife. The men didn't complain. Men on quarter rations complain. These men didn't. They ate what I gave them and they lay back down. The cold went. That was the second thing. It had been a January cold. A cold that got in the bones and didn't leave. And then one morning, if it was morning, the cold wasn't there. The air in the dugout was warm. Not hot. Warm. A thick, close warm. The kind you get in a room with too many people and the window shut. I told myself it was the lamps. We only had one lamp lit. I told myself anyway. The men slept. All of them. They slept and slept. I'd wake Wheeler and he'd open his eyes and look at me and close them again. Briggs slept with the headset still on. I shook him once and he came up out of it slow and I said nothing and he went back down. I stopped shaking them after that. There was a smell. Copper. Like old pennies. It was in the air and it was in my mouth and it was on the blanket when I pressed my face against it. I told myself it was the cordite from the barrage set settling in the walls. I told myself that a lot. The walls. The walls of the dugout looked closer than they had. I measured once, heel to heel, from one wall to the other. Seven paces. I measured again a day later, or what I thought was a day later. Six. I told myself I was taking longer steps. I told myself the mud had slumped inward from the shelling. Trench shift, they called it. It happened. I held onto that. I wrote. I wrote because if I stopped writing, I'd sleep, and if I slept, I might not come up again. I wrote by one candle. The paper got damp from my hand. The pencil was short. I had to pinch it close to the point. The lead smudged. My writing went smaller and then bigger and then crooked across the page. Mother, I wrote. I don't know what day it is. I don't know if you'll ever read this. I'm writing it anyway. I wrote Hollis, walked into the fog. I wrote the telephone is dead. I wrote Wheeler is sleeping and I can't wake him properly. I wrote the air is warm and it shouldn't be warm. I wrote I can smell copper. I wrote I think something is wrong with the time. I stopped. I looked at what I'd written. I crossed out the last line. Then I wrote it again underneath. The candle flickered. A bead of wax ran down the side and set on the crate. I lit another from the stub of it. I had four left. I'd counted them. I went to the radio. I sat at the crate. I put the headset on. I turned the dial very slow. The grinding was still there. It had changed. I listened and I tried to tell myself it hadn't changed and I couldn't. Before, it had just been on and on. Now there was something under it, a pattern. A thing that came back around every few seconds. Not a voice. Not a code. A shape in the sound. Like something heavy being set down and then lifted and then set down again. A slow, patient rhythm. On and on. I took the headset off. I set it very carefully on the crate. I sat there with my hands in my lap. Wheeler came for me. I'd been at the radio, I think. The headset was in my lap. I don't remember taking it off. He put a hand on my shoulder and he didn't say anything, just tipped his head toward the steps. I got up. The trench was the same. Night now, or what passed for night. The gray had gone to a darker gray. You could still only see a few feet past the wire. The duckboards were slick. My boots made a soft, sucking sound on the wood and I tried to make them quiet and I couldn't. The air on my face was cold and wet. It tasted of iron and old smoke. Somewhere down the line, a man coughed twice and stopped. We got to the fire step. Wheeler climbed up first. I climbed after him. The sandbag was on the ground. I couldn't see him. I couldn't see him. I couldn't see him. I couldn't see him. The sandbag at my hands was wet and cold and gritty. Sand had worked through the cloth. It stuck to my palms. He put a finger to his lips. I nodded. He pointed. I looked. The fog was doing something it hadn't done before. It was thinning, not lifting. Thinning. A lane opened in it. Not wide, maybe twenty feet across. And it held. That was the wrong part. Fog doesn't hold. It moves. This one had opened a lane and the lane was staying open. At the end of the lane, there was a crater. A big one. Eighty yards out, give or take. The lip of it was a black curve against the grey and the inside of it was darker still. A wet earth smell came off it, turned clay and rot and something sharper under that. There was a man standing on the lip. I saw him and I didn't say anything for a second. I just looked. Wheeler was looking too. His breath was coming short beside me. I could hear it. The man was tall. Taller than he ought to be at that distance. Or maybe it was just the way he stood. Very straight. Very still. Not like a man trying to hide. Still like a man who wasn't thinking about us at all. He wore a long dark coat. A travelling coat. It came down past his knees. The cut of it was wrong. I couldn't have told you why. I've thought about it since. It was the cut of a coat my grandfather might have worn, maybe. Something from before. Not a uniform. Not trench kit. A civilian coat, out of its time. He had no helmet, no pack, no rifle, no webbing. Nothing strapped to him at all. His head was bare except for a flat, dark cap, the brim pulled. His face was turned down. I could see the pale line of his jaw and nothing else. In one hand, a small book. Leather, the kind you'd keep in a breast pocket. A ledger. In the other hand, a pencil, held loose between finger and thumb. He wasn't writing. He was just holding them. He stood at the edge of the crater, the way a man stands at a grave. You keep your hands in front of you. You keep your head down. You wait. That's what he was doing. He was waiting. Wheeler said, Sir. The ground. I looked at the ground. That was when it went bad for me. I hadn't been scared up to then. Curious, a little sick, not scared. Then I looked at the ground, and I was. His boots were clean. I want you to understand what I mean by that. The field between us was mud. Not a field with mud in it. Mud. Churned to the knee in places. You couldn't take three steps in it without sinking to the ankle. Every man in our platoon had mud up to the thigh on his trousers and mud caked on his puttees in hard gray plates. Wheeler beside me had mud on his jaw from where he'd rubbed his face with a dirty hand. This man had no mud on him. None. His coat was dark, but it was dark cloth, not dark with water. His boots were black and polished. The leather caught what little light there was. He had got to the lip of that crater without walking through the field. That's what it meant. There wasn't another way to read it. And he stood there now with polished boots on a lip of mud, and he didn't react to us at all. Wheeler started to wave. A slow wave. High. He hissed. Hey. Hey. Hey. Over here. Nothing. I tried. Cupped my hands. Didn't shout. Didn't dare. Nothing. Not a twitch. Not a shift in the weight. The head stayed down. The ledger stayed in the one hand and the pencil in the other, and the coat hung as though there was no wind at all, which there wasn't. Wheeler was shaking. I could feel it through the sandbag. His whole side was shaking. I said, It's a civilian. A Frenchman. A farmer. He's lost. An old man. He's wandered out. He doesn't know where he is. I said it because I needed him to stop shaking. I said it because I needed me to stop shaking. I don't think either of us believed it. But we stood there, and I said it. And Wheeler nodded once, slow, and he didn't say anything back. A gust came. It was cold on my right cheek, and it carried the smell of wet wool and cordite. It came across the field from our right, and the fog rolled back and closed the lane. It took maybe two seconds. When it opened again, he was gone. The lip of the crater was empty. The ground in front of it was empty. There were no prints. I looked for them. I looked hard. I kept looking after Wheeler had climbed down. The lane was still there, that wrong thin lane in the fog, and the mud in it was smooth. Nobody had walked through it. Nobody had walked away from the crater in any direction I could see. I climbed down. Wheeler was sitting on the fire step with his back against the sandbags. His hands were on his knees. He wouldn't look at me. I said, A lost Frenchman. He didn't answer. I said it again. Wheeler. A lost Frenchman. Yes. He nodded. He didn't look up. I went down into the dugout. The lamp was low. Briggs was at the radio. The headset had slipped off one ear and was hanging against his neck. His eyes were open. He wasn't humming anymore. It was just quiet. The others were asleep. All of them. Ugh, I hate Mondays. Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm. Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm. Bites. Jibba-dabba-doo. Don't you love them? Sweet, swirly, so good. The two older men against the back wall. A private curled into the clay with his cheek on his own arm. Their mouths were open. Their chests moved slow. One of the older men had a line of spit at the corner of his mouth. None of them snored. That was the part I noticed. Four men asleep and no sound from any of them but the slow pull of breath. The air was warm, warmer than it had been before I went up. Thick and close and a little sweet. The copper smell was still there under it. I sat down at the crate. I moved Briggs' hand gently off the dial. He let me. He didn't look at me. The grinding was there. The pattern under it was stronger now, closer. The thing being set down and lifted and set down. It had a weight to it you could almost feel in your chest. I got my tin out. I got the pencil. I wrote. Mother. There was a man on the crater. A civilian. He was lost. I'm sure of it. Wheeler saw him too. I didn't cross it out. I folded the paper. And put it in the tin. I told myself I'd stay awake. That I'd sit at the radio until one of the men woke on his own. That was the plan. The candle was low. The new wick caught and the hot wax smell came up close and clean. I had three left. I'd counted them again. I sat. I watched the flame. I listened to the grinding in the headset on the crate beside me. The small, tinny version of it leaking out of the cup. The flame went sideways. It did that sometimes. A draft somewhere. I put my hand on my knee and pressed down to feel the bone. I blinked. Blinked again. The candle guttered. The grinding rose. I woke to light. Not the candle. Not the lamp. A grey, filtered light that shouldn't have been in the light. It was the light that was in the dark. I felt it on my face before I opened my eyes. I knew it was wrong before I knew what it was. I opened my eyes. I opened my eyes. I opened my eyes. Sky. Open sky above me. Flat and pale. No timber beams. No clay roof. No crate of sandbags over my head. Just sky. Just sky. I sat up slow. I was on my back in mud. Thin, brown mud. Cold at the shoulder blades. Cold at the backs of my knees. My coat was open. My hands were at my knees. I was on my sides. My rifle was not with me. My pack was not with me. The tin in my pocket was still there. I could feel the square edge of it against my ribs through the shirt. That was the only thing that felt right. I looked around. I wasn't in the trench. I was out. A hundred meters out. Maybe more. The ground stretched flat in every direction. No wire. No craters. No posts. No bodies. No fog. The air was still. No smell either. No cordite. No lime. No wet wool. I could see a long way and there was nothing to see. My head didn't hurt. I want you to understand that too. My head had been hurting for days. A dull, steady press behind my eyes. It had just become part of the quiet. It was gone now. The pressure was gone. My ears didn't ring. My jaw didn't ache. I felt clean in a way that frightened me. I called for Wheeler. Nothing came back. Not an echo. Not a bird. The sound of my own voice went out and didn't come back. I called for Briggs. I called for Hollis. I called for any of them. Silence. I didn't stagger. I wasn't dizzy. I turned a full circle and I saw the same flat ground on every side. No trench. No landmark. Nothing to point at. Walk back. Walk back. I told myself. Walk back. So I picked a direction and started walking. I want to be honest. I knew, even then, that I wasn't walking back. The trench was behind me. I could feel it behind me. I was walking the other way. I kept walking anyway. My boots made no sound in the mud. The mud made no sound under them. I walked. A few minutes. Longer. Longer. Time wasn't doing what it should have been doing. The light didn't change. The sky didn't move. I walked and the ground went on and I walked. The ground softened. I noticed it in my boots first. The sink of the mud got less. The weight of it on my putties got less. After a while I looked down and the mud had thinned out. There were patches in it. Small, stubborn patches of something green. Short and sparse and wrongly shaped. I looked down and the mud had thinned out. him. The mud took my weight without a sound. The shoulder was cold. Not cool. Cold. The kind of cold that isn't in the cloth. It's in the body under it. I knew he was dead before I turned his head. I turned his head anyway. It was me. My face, my jaw, my mouth, my nose. Mine. My hand was still on his shoulder. I could feel the cold of him through the cloth. I could feel the weight of him under my hand. He was as real as the mud he lay in. I didn't move. I don't know how long I knelt there. Maybe a second. Maybe longer. My head wouldn't hold a single thought. It kept slipping. Then the sound started. High, a ringing, thin and sharp in both ears at once. It climbed, it got louder, it pressed in on the sides of my skull. A crack came across the sky, not thunder. The sound of a shell landing, played in reverse and at full volume. It hit all at once. I felt it in my teeth, A white flash. The field went. It came back in pieces, fast and ugly, one after another. The sky above the trench lit up bright and chemical. The dugout. The candles. Wheeler's mouth open mid-shout. Briggs with his hand still reaching for the radio dial. Hollis's hand on the rung of the ladder, his foot up, the step he never took. The timber beams coming down. The world going black before any of us could scream. It was over before it began. There was no week. There was no fog. There was no figure in the coat. There was no lost Frenchman. There was no rationing. There was no radio. There was no Hollis sent running with a message. There was only the shell and the dugout and the dark. I stood over my own body and I understood. I didn't cry. I didn't shout. I didn't fall. I stood and I looked down at him. At me, at the shape of the boy on the ground in the British uniform with the tin in his coat pocket. I let out a long breath. The weight went with it. Then the light changed. The grey warmed. I felt it on my face first. Warm on my cheek. Warm on the bridge of my nose. The wind came up. It wasn't cold. it wasn't wet. It carried cut grass and warm stone and a little smoke from somewhere, a kitchen chimney, a long way off. It was the wind you get in July at the bottom of a garden. The ground under my feet went green. It happened slow. The patches spread. The mud pulled back. Tall grass came up where the mud had been. It moved in the breeze. I felt it brush the back of my hand. The sky over me opened. It went from pale gray to deep blue. A real blue. The kind you see in August. A bird called somewhere I couldn't see. A skylark. Then another, lower down. A black bird. I knew the sound. I'd grown up with the sound. An oak. Our oak. The one at the bottom of the garden, deep roots, wide canopy. The dappled light under it looked just like Sunday afternoons. I walked toward it. I was clean. I was wearing the clothes I'd worn on the platform, the shirt my mother had pressed. I reached the tree. I put my hand on the bark. It was warm. The ridges were deep and dry. I knew them. A beetle moved on a root by my boot. I closed my eyes. The rain came down steady on black umbrellas. A small country graveyard in the south of England, late autumn. The trees were bare. The grass between the stones was soft and wet. Wet leaves stuck to the path. The air smelled of leaves and cold stone. Past the iron fence a crow called once and stopped. His mother stood at the graveside. His sister stood beside her. They wore heavy black mourning clothes. Their faces were pale and set. Rain ran off the brim of the vicar's hat in a thin, steady line. The casket was closed. The casket was empty. His body had never been brought home. The vicar spoke. His words didn't carry far in the rain. The mourners bowed their heads. A few men from the village were there. Two old soldiers stood at the back with their caps held against their backs. They held their chests. No one cried loud. When the service was done, the mourners began to move away from the stone. The path was muddy and the older ones took care with their footing. A man in a long coat stepped forward from the line. He wasn't from the village. His coat was clean. He held his hat in his hands. He came up to Arthur's mother and waited until she looked at him. He told her his name and his office. He told her they hadn't found her son. He told her they'd found something else. He held out his hand. In his palm was a small brass artillery casing. It was dark with tarnish. It had been cleaned of mud and wiped dry. Inside, he said, were her son's letters. The last of them. They'd been sealed in the casing and buried with what remained of the dugout. He said it carefully. He placed the casing in her hand. She closed her fingers around it. Her sister took her other arm and they stood that way for a moment in the rain. Past the graveside. Past the mourners. Past the iron fence at the edge of the cemetery. A figure stood still among the yew trees. A long dark traveling coat. A flat cap. A small leather-bound ledger in one gloved hand. No one at the funeral saw him. The rain kept falling. That night his mother sat alone at the kitchen table. The casing lay in front of her on the bare wood. The lamp was low. The wick smelled faintly of paraffin. Her sister was asleep upstairs. The clock in the hall ticked. Nothing else made a sound. She opened the casing. She took the letters out. One by one. Laid them on the cloth. They were soft at the edges. The paper smelled of old smoke. Some of the ink had bled. The last one was easy to find by the feel of the paper. Unfolded it. Down to the line at the bottom. It was in his handwriting. Unfolded it, down to the line at the bottom. Do not wait for me. Thanks for letting me keep you company in the dark tonight. I hope the chills helped clear your mind. Hit subscribe to claim your spot in the nocturnal crew, and I'll see you later. Good night. swirl bite taylor hansen sure i'll try one hey let's get back to work please but taylor hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly king's hawaiian cinnamon bites taylor hansen nice try one kings hawaiian cinnamon bites there's nothing like it