In Memoriam

by Alice Winn

We had reached a point in history where we believed it was possible to make war humane.

Ellwood wanted to hit each one of them in turn, in case one proved to be the weak spot that would crack Gaunt open.

Boys thought him brave because he never complained, but Gaunt didn’t call that bravery. Bravery was not so unquestioning.

It seemed that he had always been scraping along on his belly through mud and gore, as if there had never been anything else.

terror lancing through him, stark and bright, like facing open fire.

My dearest, darling Sidney, There was nothing else. Only dead white paper, blank and meaningless. A comma, followed by nothing. Death summed up by grammar.

winced. “I doubt the barbarians minded the Romans, once they had their roads and baths.” “On the contrary,” said Gaunt. “I think they minded extremely.”

“Oh, Ellwood likes playing at emotions,” said Maitland, watching him intently. “It distracts him from the real thing.”

When he and Ellwood were gentle with one another, there was a sense of awe to it. Their tenderness was hesitant and temporary, like a butterfly pausing on a child’s hand.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”

He dipped and parried; it was like drilling on the parade ground; it was killing as they had done at Agincourt, and it would wash him clean. England is magic. Nothing is worth this. His mind began to wander crazily through time, and he thought of King Arthur—bowels falling out of bodies—of the Hundred Years’ War—his rifle was slippery with blood—

Hayes’ blood splattering into his eyes. Pritchard’s body blown apart. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings—

It seemed ironic that the part of him that would once have been overjoyed at the sight of the medal was precisely what had been blighted in obtaining it.

He merely cut away the blackened, gangrenous bits of his soul and sold them.

Ellwood had to turn away, because it was painful to look at something so lovely without knowing if he would be allowed to keep it.

They were clear-eyed, the Greeks. They did not dress up the world with romance and chivalry, did not lure poetry-hearted fools into evil.

“Yes, it’s an abomination,” he said, lightly, although he knew it wasn’t. Knew it couldn’t be. It was the cleanest, purest part of him.

“Μεγαλοψυχίη το φέρειν πραέως πλημμέλειαν,” he said. It is magnanimous to bear offence calmly. “Συγγνώμη τιμωρίας κρείσσων,” said Maud. Forgiveness is better than revenge.

Our bodies were used to stop bullets, thought Ellwood. He could think of nothing else.

“I’ve decided it doesn’t matter whether you love me back,” said Gaunt. Some long-dead poet must have written the lines with which to answer, but Ellwood no longer knew them.

Gaunt followed Ellwood to bed every night, and Ellwood didn’t tell him to stop. He crushed his mouth to Gaunt’s in a hollow, rageful imitation of affection.

“Oh, I don’t mean to be unpleasant, I wouldn’t want that, not to be unpleasant, how awful, only 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, don’t you find that interesting, Gaunt?”

They were a small-minded people, the English, and their greatest art form, writing, was small-minded also, it was provincial; it did not translate like music and painting, it was only for the English-speakers.

No one would ever give him a white feather again, at least. Not now that war had been written on his face.

Gaunt was saying something; he held Ellwood’s head close and said the same word over and over, and it took Ellwood quite a while to realise it was just his name.

Ellwood loved Brazil, but Gaunt couldn’t. He thought it beautiful—he admired it—but it filled him with yearning. He continually reminded himself that Thucydides, too, had been exiled, but nothing could lessen the grief he felt in the strangest places: in the shops, when they did not sell the tea he liked; or when it rained, and the rain was nothing like the cold, thin drizzle he knew and loved. He missed England as if it were a person.

It would be cool; that pale season when the earth woke slowly from the dead.

Let us, like the soldiers of Waterloo, have our century of peace and prosperity, for we have paid for it in blood.