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Time having passed, other wars having superseded my own, nowadays I hear it every week or so from history-buff parents—usually
in a contest against passion, truth always makes a poor showing.
heat and grease. A man hit by a shell disintegrates into bits, like an overcrisped slice of bacon when bitten.
The desire to be something other than what one is is a cruel affliction, and I am finally cured.
Pigeons have no belief in God nor any need for such belief, but like most creatures we have our rituals.
While I had no doubt that I’d encounter other queer men in the camp—with greater frequency, maybe, than I did in the city—we’d be there to serve our country, not to pursue our own liaisons.
April 2, 1917,
That’s not the day we entered the war... We entered on April 7th
After lights-out they parted the dark with belches and barking, yelled conversations, real and mock farts.
Other men may thrill to the sight of Old Glory rippling in the breeze, but for me the library was a better symbol of what I had taken up arms to defend.
My youthful excursions into socialism had fostered sympathy for the workers of the world but had given precious little guidance when it came to encountering them in person.
they indulged in the time-honored tradition of curing economics with politics and called upon the military to squeeze dollars from their soldiers.
but I also recognized that the impulse welling within me was not laughter at all but something more like terror, or rapture. I had never before felt this way toward any living being.
The war drew closer. Its approach was less like the coming of a storm, more the onset of a sickness. We could feel it changing us.
French mentors, and they told us stories. Proud and dignified, they were also respectful, and down-to-earth, and grateful for the relief. “It’s the least we can do, after that hand you lent us back in 1778,” McMurtry said.
The earth drank in blood as if thirsty for it.
Sixty-five million men were mobilized worldwide. Thirteen percent of them died. Thirty-three percent were wounded to the point of disfigurement and/or disability. Twelve percent were taken prisoner or declared missing. The overall casualty rate was 58 percent.
First you’re a living man, he said, then a writhing animal, wounded and gasping. And then you’re a thing: dead.
Each man was the miserable monarch of a kingdom that squirmed with vermin, one that consisted of the dirt and the bit of sky each one could see from the dirt, of their feet in their boots, of their boots in the mud—a kingdom all but indistinguishable from a grave.
One could never quite tell in the mess of the war when things happened for a reason or just happened because they happened.
“The punishment for being a guy like that is being a guy like that.”
could tell—in the way one lonely person can recognize loneliness in another—that
When Germany surrenders, Europe will be a goddamned mess from Paris to the Urals.
The sledgehammering booms came across distances so vast that we half expected them to knock a hidden star or two from the daylit sky.
the heroic fortitude of the bleeding soldiers whose stifled moans floated over the dark hillside.
Take the thing that bothers you and place it in parentheses. I’ve told myself that a thousand times since we got stuck in the Pocket. Bracket the death that spatters against you. Set that clotted mess aside and do not look at it anymore.
sickening odor of what Hollingshead had left as it danced with other battlefield stenches.
Straight-limbed and charming Bill, so full of joy, now already smaller, the way that the dead shrink up.
“I feel like a cat,” said Holderman, slightly hysterical, “having all nine lives at once.”
“I’ve learned that everything that thinks and feels,” she said, “grows by subtraction. Detachment brings perspective. Wisdom comes from letting go. It’s true for humans, too, but most of them seem to struggle with it.”
Honors ennoble those on whom they’re bestowed, but they also ease the guilt of those whose commands made them necessary in the first place. A medal is a mirror, reflecting a glory that we force ourselves to believe in.
deep sleep didn’t seem trustworthy,
the body quits when it must, regardless of the mind’s exhortations.
It seems childish now to confess, but my own notions of battle all came from literature. When we arrived in the Argonne, I viewed the landscape through the lens of the pastoral poems I knew,
“You really are a brainy one,” said Runyon. “Williams and Harvard? But your snoot isn’t up in the air. Watch your step, Major, or you could end up a congressman.
An armistice had been signed, putting to an end those fifty-two months of hubris and idiocy.
Why would they want me, having seen me for what I was: an officer who’d failed as a tactician and was failing as a rhetorician, a man who’d lost his battalion and now couldn’t find his voice?
To a casual observer, it might seem that we wounded heroes had the lightest duties, but a mascot’s work is the killing kind.
“The eagle is the emblem of our proud United States, but it’s the pigeon to whom we owe our present state of liberty.”
“The thing to do,” said President Wilson, staring east toward the sea, “is to try to be decent to everyone. It sounds simple, but becomes quite tiring, no?”
One week after Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, which would eventually recognize the right of women to vote. Pigeons do not vote, but as a female being I felt a degree of investment in the fortunes of other females.
Much of the war’s waste and misery arose from the actions of men who sincerely thought they were coming to the rescue.
His ready acceptance had assured me that my hunch was correct.
Very sweet.
That metaphor—“showered”—as if I were expected to receive that rain like a parched desert, when in fact it burned like acid.
it was pointless to persuade a shell-shocked man.
I thought the same shells fell on all of us, but maybe not. Maybe every man has his own shell.”
What I missed most, at least at first, was the sense that every day might turn out to be momentous, that for good or ill my life might be abruptly transformed.
“but I sometimes think of a line from Catullus, the Roman poet. ‘Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.’ That’s ‘So forever, brother, hail and farewell,’
I want to tell him that he should not assume the presence or absence of another being’s pain simply because it is not being manifested in a manner that he recognizes.
