In the Still of the Night

by the fireplace warming his hands. Everybody settled in to listen to his account.
    For a virtual hermit, he had a stunning delivery. When the room was quiet, he turned and said, dramatically, “The thing I remember most about the war was the smell. We don’t often notice odors except in passing, but the stench of the war is with me now and probably will haunt me the rest of my life. It was a porridge of death and decay and foul mud.”
    I’m not going to like this, Lily thought.
    Julian West, having delivered this line, went back in time. “I’d followed the progress of the war in the newspapers and was astonished at the sheer idiocy of it. As a writer who studied wars, I knew this was the most ill-founded and badly led of all. But when America got into it, I thought it would change, in spite of my own training, which was useless and tedious. All very impractical quick marches, slow marches, hand signals everyone had to learn, silly rules about filling in garbage dumps and latrines before moving forward. As if warriors have all the time in the world for housekeeping.
    “There had been no military tactics whatsoever. The French and English had simply been sending wave after wave of young men over the top of the trenches to be slaughtered. And so had the Germans. I foolishly thought when the Americans went in, real warfare would finish it off. As a patriot, I thought our generals would be smarter, more experienced and would have a genuine sense of military maneuvers designed to win, rather than sending helpless young men to be machine gunned.”
    Julian took a sip of his drink and went on. “I joined up and my cousin John, who had been my secretary, best friend, and student, insisted on joining up with me. So did our man Bud Carpenter. As a nominal chaplain, I was able to convince the authorities that I needed both of them with me. We had six weeks of training, as I said earlier, just a lot of useless marching in step, then took a ship to St. Navarre where Black Jack Pershing had landed the American Expeditionary Forces initially.
    “We rode in crowded trucks across France to the southwest. As we approached the Argonne Forest, we could hear and smell the war. At first only faintly. But soon the sound and stench became overwhelming. At one point, I was riding in the front with the driver and as we came over a low rise, I could see the forest of Argonne. But it was no longer a forest. It was a landscape of miles of fallen or denuded trees and craters and mud. It was as if long dead trees had been dumped on the moon or Mars.
    “In civilian life we think of trenches as long, clean cuts in the earth for laying pipes. But in wars, the trenches are zig-zagged. This is so that the enemy can’t drop down into a trench and kill a line of men with a few efficient shots. With the zig-zag, he could only get the few in one leg of the trench, and would have no idea what was around the next corner coming at him.
    “These trenches had utterly destroyed the landscape. Vast amounts of boggy soil had been laboriously dug up and piled in front of the trenches as parapets. Communication trenches ran through as supply lines and for removal of bodies and injured men being taken back.”
    Julian West was so absorbed in what he was saying that he didn’t seem to notice Phoebe Twinkle go pale and slip out the door. Lorna Pratt Ethridge was leaning a bit forward in her chair, as if not wanting to miss a word.
    Rachel, who had claimed not to be a sissy, was looking down and twisting her hands in her lap. Even Cecil looked a bit queasy.
    The account got worse.

Chapter 9

    “I thought my first view of the battlefield was the most awful thing I’d ever seen,“ Julian West said. “Until we got closer. Until I spent cold night after night sleeping in a slimy ooze of blood, rotting flesh, bloated rats gorging themselves on the dead and dying and running over the living as if we were no more than part of the landscape.
    “We slept through barrages of gunfire and bombs and the screams of men. We didn’t dare let our gas masks get lost. Clouds of greasy, foul mustard gas would drift over no-man’s-land. We could hear the wounded men out there who hadn’t been rescued and wouldn’t be until dark, coughing before we even saw the gas cloud.
    “Mustard gas is heavier than air and it would slither over any parapet that wasn’t high enough and lie in a miasma around us. Even now, and probably for decades to come, possibly to the end of