He tells himself that it’s just a walk in
the woods with a gun. The world, which was once a bright and
shining place, has been drained of all color. Here there are only shades of
gray and brown. The world which was once wide and unlimited, green fields and
rolling forested hills and shining seas across which a man could walk or run or
sail or swim or ride for miles has been circumscribed in this place to a fetid
brown slit in the earth, always crumbling in upon itself, abhorring its own vacuum.
Left to its own devices it would be gone in a year, discernible only as a
meandering depression in a green field. Some future day it might be, but not
now. It gapes like a brown wound in the gray ground, its edges crusted with
wire and shards of metal and bits of broken wood and shattered lives. An
infected wound, it festers sullenly, human maggots teeming in its narrow
confine.
Once there was a world where the right
words or enough money could get you anything, anyone, and he had money and
words to spare. He still has money, and perhaps the words, though he rarely
speaks these days. Here the magic of words is almost dead.
No beautiful turn of phrase, no artful adjective will advance a man's cause one
iota. There are only two words that matter here, that have the power over
lives. “OFFICIAL ORDERS.”
Money will not buy these words; money
will not buy you anything within these narrow, muddy walls. Cigarettes,
chocolate, tinned fruit - these are all a minor sort of lucre here, the
currency of card games and lotteries, but paper money is good for nothing but
wiping a man's ass and coins not even for that. Here he is just another trader
in the only medium of exchange that matters, bullets. Somewhere in that bright
and distant world he is paid monthly in cash and coins, which accrue unseen in
the vault of some bank, secure behind a round door of polished steel and a row
of smiling faces and red brick walls. Here he is paid daily in bullets and exhorted
to spend, spend, spend. No matter how much of these shiny brass-and-copper
tokens he disposes of, flings away like a gambler on a losing streak, there are
always more, neatly packed in wooden boxes, pressed into his hands by the Sergeant.
“OFFICIAL ORDERS.” Even these words are
capricious, spoken aloud they have no meaning, the words are magic only when
stamped in blue ink across the top of a scrap of paper bearing the hasty scrawl
of some General at the bottom. Spoken aloud, words have no meaning, so few men
speak much here. Most words you will hear spoken are lies, he has learned, they
have all learned, from bitter experience.
The officers lie that when they say “We’re almost there, boys, just one more charge.”
The chaplains lie when they say “Deus nobiscum, quis contra?”
The cook lies when he says “Its bully beef in the stew, lads.”
The only words that matter here are that elusive pair stamped in blue, “OFFICIAL ORDERS,” and hers, a flowing cursive script on pages worn thin as parchment, cracking along the folds, perfumed by white gardenias whose scent is now only rendered tangible by some wishful trick of memory.
The officers lie that when they say “We’re almost there, boys, just one more charge.”
The chaplains lie when they say “Deus nobiscum, quis contra?”
The cook lies when he says “Its bully beef in the stew, lads.”
The only words that matter here are that elusive pair stamped in blue, “OFFICIAL ORDERS,” and hers, a flowing cursive script on pages worn thin as parchment, cracking along the folds, perfumed by white gardenias whose scent is now only rendered tangible by some wishful trick of memory.
Her words are the only thing he can rely
on, his last link to that lost world. That they reach him at all seems a minor
sort of miracle, that these delicate scraps of paper bearing his name, and the
words “American Volunteer, Fourth Army, France” are placed among similar
thousands on a giant ship, a ship that navigates the freezing waters between
the lost world and this one, waters teeming with icebergs and cod, mines and
limpets, blue whales and Untersee boots,
that these ships arrive unfailingly at foreign shores, are unloaded, that the
letter finds its way in a lorry from Paris, a horse-drawn cart from Reims, is
carried in a sack down, down into the brown infested scar to the buried pustule
of the company office, where it lays in a stained wooden box among a stack of
other letters, bearing other names, until the Sergeant scoops them all up in a
grimy hand and shuffles up the creaking stair and into the eternal twilight gloom
of the trench, calling out “mail call, mail… Owens… Vandermeer… Andrews…”
Always there are more names called than
there are answers, always the Sergeant will return to the bunker with a handful
of lonesome envelopes which will be stamped in red, “RETURN TO SENDER” and make
their way slowly back across the cold sea. He wishes he could be stamped in
red, they could stamp him all over, over and over, and return him, but he would
just end up here, with himself, because of course she didn’t send him, she
never wanted him to go, he sent himself here, they all did, back when they were
different, more innocent men. Now there are no innocents, they are all
murderers, all condemned, their sentences hanging heavy in the foul, damp air.
Her letters are his last link to that lost world, and then one day, they stop coming.
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