In the Still of the Night

back behind the Western Front. Trucks full of dead and dying alongside each other. Sometimes they were all dead before we got them to the hospital tents. I’d leave them either to the medics or the burial details and we’d go back to the front for more. That sounds like an easy job, I know. Hard on the heart, but easy.
    “Not so. The roads were narrow, constantly clogged with trucks that were trying to get food, and ammunition, and yet more stupid, innocent young men to the front. We’d have to stop and lay our dead in the mud to lighten the weight of our vehicles so we wouldn’t sink into the mess as well while we helped push the trucks out of ruts. Bud would sit with them to keep the rats away while my cousin and I pushed trucks.”
    Lily glanced at Bud. He was absolutely expressionless, but was nodding slightly.
    “About six weeks in, one of our boys found a wooden chair in a deserted farmhouse and it was the only luxury we had. They had a roster of who got to sit in a real chair for an hour. In the middle of the night some months later, the Fritz lobbed something highly incendiary over the parapet and set the chair on fire and killed the boy sitting on it. The burning chair made a beacon, a target. We had to put the fire out. My cousin ran to throw a blanket over it to smother the flame.”
    West drew a long breath and squashed out his cigarette in a ashtray stand next to the fireplace. “It must have been the only dry blanket in the whole army. Or maybe it had come into contact with a leaking petrol can from a truck. I never knew. It burst into flames. I pulled him away and pummeled him with my hands to put out the flames—”
    He gestured feebly at his face and spread his hands. “I got this, but my cousin died in agony. His flesh was charred over so much of his body that he went into shock. Bud and I took his body back ourselves to the mortuary tent. It wasn’t until we got to the medic tent that I had any idea how badly I was burned as well.“
    “And you were sent back home?“ Cecil asked. His voice was shaky.
    “Not home. Only to England. I spent six months having surgery and treatment. I didn’t care so much about my face, but my fingers had to work or I couldn’t ever write again.”
    He knocked back the last of his drink and subsided onto the arm of a sofa near the fireplace.
    “Bud stayed with me over everybody’s objections. When we finally returned to New York, I threw away my suitcase, saving only my notes, copies of the letters I’d sent Newton Baker, and a partial manuscript I’d worked on. And even that was in a sealed, waxed container so I didn’t have to smell it. Bud went out and got us new clothes and we threw away our uniforms, which the hospital had insisted we had to wear on the boat home. I couldn’t stand the smell.
    “When we finally got upstate, it was warm weather. I opened the sealed package outdoors and copied everything to fresh, clean paper in the breeze and burned the originals, which stank of death and rank mud. Or perhaps the smell was only locked in my brain.”
    He looked around the room. “Sometimes I dream that smell and wake up gagging. Sometimes I imagine I get a faint whiff of it even when waking. The worst smell in the world’s history.”
    There was a collective sigh, but no one spoke. West finally said, “Aren’t you sorry you asked?”
    Lorna Ethridge spoke up for the first time since West had started talking. “No, we need to know. Everyone needs to know. So it won’t ever happen again.“
    “Oh, it’ll happen again,“ West said. “The War to End All Wars is an immoral phrase. The Germans are grudge-holders. Just a few months ago, they refused to pay any more war reparation money. And if the crazy house painter Adolf Hitler should win in the next election, there will be another war.
    “And then there’s the Pope being a fool,“ he said angrily. “Last December the ‘Vicar of Christ’—God’s peacemaker—refused to meet with Gandhi—a true peacemaker—because of the way Gandhi dressed, for God’s sake! And two months later, he’s being chummy with Mussolini, who is a bully and a thug. Without a positive influence from the leader of the biggest, most powerful religious organization in Europe and America, how could we have peace? Oh, yes. There will be another Great War.
    “But I hope it doesn’t start again before the American military realizes that just sending the flower of our youth out into no-man’s-land and telling