In the Still of the Night

this century, it remains in the soil. And a man who wants to reclaim the ruined land for farming can plow into a trench and die horribly as a result of releasing the fumes.
    “The Tommys and Frogs who had survived the earlier years were wily men, but our poor young doughboys hadn’t been told what deadly forces they were up against. All they’d been told was how to march in order, and understand hand signals, and to stay away from loose foreign women in the cities.
    “The first day John, Bud and I were in the trenches, four of the youngsters were playing cards when a mustard gas cannister landed in our section of trench and exploded. By the time they could find their gas masks, they were coughing up bloody foam and pieces of their lungs.”
    Almost nobody could meet anyone else’s gaze. Only Lily and Robert looked directly at each other. Robert’s face was frigid and white. Should there be another war after the War to End All Wars, which was inevitable given human nature, he might confront something like this.
    It was too horrible to contemplate and Lily wished she’d left the room with Phoebe. She had an eerie feeling, too, that Julian West was, in some perverse way, showing off. He was enjoying making them heartsick. But wasn’t that part of the job of the wordsmith?
    Julian went on. “Oddly enough, another thing that I remember most vividly was the lack of color. The ground was a soupy gray-brown. Our uniforms quickly turned the same color. The sky, always filled with smoke, was gray-brown. I never saw a clear blue sky. The standing trunks and few limbs of trees were leafless and pitted with holes and were brown. Some had bits of bone and flesh stuck to them. There were no toilets, only holes in the ground back behind the lines, and the boys with cholera couldn’t get there. Their shit was brown. The rats were brown. Only the blood was red, and it soon turned brown. Oh, and the orange-brown slugs that one was always accidentally putting one’s hand on. We couldn’t bathe. We had lice in our hair and underwear. Most of the men got trench foot, some of them lost their feet to it when the gangrene set in.”
    Somebody made a faint gagging noise. Rachel stood up suddenly and left the room. Bud Carpenter was standing by the door to the room and opened the door for her with a perfectly blank expression on his face.
    Cecil, apparently having had enough of the gruesome details, asked a question. “How long were you there?“
    “Two months. Two years, two decades, it seemed,“ West said. “It seemed a lifetime. I was afraid I’d never see another flat field of healthy crops or a house that was intact or a church that hadn’t been bombed to rumble. Or another pretty girl in a clean dress or decent food on a white plate, or birds. I’d make myself imagine such things to put myself to sleep, trying to block out the sound of rats squeaking and gnawing. Such common things we thought about just to keep our sanity and survive, but they are gone now along a wide strip of devastation from Belgium clear to Switzerland.”
    He paused to sip the last of his drink. Robert silently took the glass from him and refilled it.
    “Thank you,“ West said, then continued, “I wondered often where the people who had lived there for generations had gone. They’d survived the onslaught of ancient Romans and Mongols and Huns, the constant small wars on the border of France and Germany, the Napoleonic wars, and somehow kept their farms and forests, but not this war.”
    He took a deep draught of his drink and coughed slightly.
    “The land was ruined, the forest was dead, fouled for all time with death. Row after row of stinking trenches marking the ebb and flow of armies pushing each other back and forth at the points of bayonets.”
    West set his drink on the mantel and lit a cigarette, flipping the wooden match into the fireplace. He took a long draw on the cigarette and went on. “Unexploded bombs were left behind in trenches, waiting to kill the unwary for decades to come, bodies and parts of bodies were squashed into the mud where someday if you ever tried to dig a basement you’d be bound to come across the twisted, crushed remains.”
    It was obvious that Cecil had failed to turn the tide of the narrative. He tried again. “Was the war over while you were there? Is that why you left in two months?“
    “No, it wasn’t over. I was responsible for the dying men. And the dead. John and Bud and I would accompany them