Phoenix and Ashes

"—watched that gas coming closer and closer; couldn't move, didn't dare, had a machine gun above us to get anybody that bolted that took out two of my men that tried—"

"—one minute, passing me a smoke, the next, head gone—"

"—arm sticking out of the trench wall. Men used to give it a handshake as they went past—"

"—sweet Jesus, the smell! If I can just get it out of my nose for a minute—"

"The smell—" Reggie repeated, with complete understanding. No one who had not been in the trenches understood what that meant. He hadn't not really, until he'd been buried in a bunker. One part, the stink of aged mustard gas. One part, stagnant water. One part, rat urine, for the rats were everywhere and only a gas attack got rid of them. One part, unwashed human body, for what was the point of washing when you were standing knee-deep in stagnant water? And one part dead and rotting human flesh. When somebody died, you gathered up as much as you could of him to bury—but sometimes your trenches were dug across an old burial-field, or sometimes, when a bomb or a barrage had hit the trench directly, there were so many bits scattered about that you just cleaned up what you could and dumped what might remain after the stretcher-bearers left into a hole. It wasn't the first time that Reggie had heard a story like the hand and arm sticking out of a trench-wall. Soon enough, you got numb to seeing things like that. Especially if you were in the FBI.

But that stink never left you. It got in your nose, in your hair, lodged in your memory until you couldn't draw a free breath anymore.

Yet his exposure it had been so brief—many of the officers in this ward had lived with it for weeks, months. Maybe they got used to it.

Maybe they just got numb to it.

"Know what the real relief is? Not having to bloody lie to the boys anymore."

That was another new voice, a tired, tired voice from the other side of his new neighbor. Reggie got himself up on his elbow and peered through the gloom.

It was, indeed, a new man—older than Reggie, old enough to have been Reggie's father, in fact. Oh, God, he thought in sudden recollection. They've raised the conscription age to fifty, haven't they? One eye was bandaged; in fact, half his head was bandaged on that side, and his shoulder as well.

"I mean," the man continued, doggedly, "They're just kids, and they believe you when you tell them that bunk about 'one more push’, 'over the top and on to Berlin.' They tell you to tell it to these kids, and you do, and you know you're lying to them, that you're all going over the top and nothing is going to change except that half of them aren't going to be in the trench when you scramble back. Cod how I hate the lying—"

There were uncomfortable murmurs, but no one disagreed with him. What was treason to say on the front was of little matter in the ward. What was the War Department going to do, anyway? Line up a lot of men with empty sleeves and empty pant-legs and shoot them? Especially when they were only telling the truth?

Insanity. Pure insanity—the generals at the rear giving the same orders, over and over and over again, regardless of the fact that all those orders did was to kill a few thousand men and maim a few thousand more without winning back an inch of ground. Reggie lay back down and stared at the ceiling himself, seeing the future stretching on, bleak and full of death. He had the sudden notion that this was never going to end, not until the generals found there was no one to put in the trenches but toddlers and senile old men. Or until one side or another found some weapon so vile, so destructive, that it would sweep from the Western Front to the Eastern Front in a path of lunatic carnage, leaving nothing alive on the entire continent... and he no longer had the illusion that such a weapon, if found, would not be used. Give a man who saw his fellow men as markers on a board such a weapon, and he would use it, and damn the consequences, and there were plenty such men on both sides of this conflict.

"I'm tired," said the man who had said he hated lying. "I want—"

But neither Reggie, nor anyone else, was ever to find out what he wanted, for he suddenly shivered all over so that the bed rattled, and then lay terribly still.

A deathly quiet settled over the ward, a quiet in which Reggie heard a steady thumping as of distant thunder. The sound of the guns across the Channel, carried on the wind.

Someone cleared his throat. "Poor bastard," said someone else, in a voice of detached pity. "He's out of it now."

"Maybe—" Reggie began, then kept the rest of what he would have said behind his teeth, and listened to the barrage falling, somewhere— somewhere—out in the darkness.