In Memoriam

by Alice Winn

You’re squandering your years as if they’re limitless—”

The Hague Convention sought to make war more humane. We had reached a point in history where we believed it was possible to make war humane.

All his boyhood had been spent playing soldiers, and now he had seen it, seen splattered brains on a man’s face, brighter and clearer than all the literature he had ever read.

“He only sneezed,” said Ellwood, who felt that there was something unsportsmanlike about shooting a man for sneezing.

I feel as if my skin’s been burnt away, and I’m just a ragged skeleton walking—nerves without skin—”

Gaunt was woven into everything he read, saw, wrote, did, dreamt. Every poem had been written about him, every song composed for him, and Ellwood could not scrape his mind clean of him no matter how he tried.

In the hypermasculine atmosphere of war, they were not overly concerned with manliness.

Gaunt turned over to face Ellwood and caught his eye. Ellwood smiled, and a sudden, dry bleakness spread over Gaunt’s heart as he thought of Hercules, and Hector, and all the heroes in myth who found happiness briefly, only for it not to be the end of the story.

He had not yet built up that remorseless indifference to pain that was a prerequisite to survival at the front.

His heart was heavy with something he couldn’t understand because it was too huge and too futile. His mind was repulsed by this grief that felt like infinity: impossible.

In his mind, he saw empires rise and fall like the swelling and abating of the tide, perpetual, each society blindly throwing its tragedies and flaws onto foreign shores. It seemed inevitable, and yet, from the perspective of the sanded beaches, devastatingly corrosive.

The land had lain for a century dead, but now it had awoken, demanding blood.

“All that time in the wild makes one appreciate things like furniture, doesn’t it?” said Pritchard. “Yes,” said Gaunt. “Benches are marvellous inventions.”

He would die with the fire in his bones, because when it went out, there would be nothing left. Everything was ash.

“I know you’re fine,” said Ellwood, frowning. “But are you all right?”

“I should never have told you, if you hadn’t asked,” he said, finally. “So. Thank you. For asking.”

I do think it’s peculiar, how much more drawn people are to disaster than to beauty, how curious we are about the things that can be done to a body,

Gaunt was tempted to think, Even with his injury, he is handsome, but that wasn’t quite right. Ellwood wasn’t handsome despite his disfigurement. The loss of his eye had been what guaranteed his life, and so, to Gaunt, it was beautiful. He was grateful to that wound. He would not change a single, scarred inch of it.

“I think,” said Gaunt, watching her set the dollhouse to rights, “that if he gave me the smallest hope—I should wait forever.”