Phoenix and Ashes

'Finally—no more ruddy show for the folks back home. No pretending it's all beer and skittles and no one ever gets hurt. Not that they don't know, of course, because they do, but you have to pretend anyway. No reckoning how much life you're going to pack into a ninety-six hour leave 'cause it might be the last one you get, while pretending it's nothing much. No more careful letters that don't let on. No more wondering if you're going to do a funk. It's over, the worst has happened.' He did sound relieved. Reggie swallowed, his mouth gone dry. Maybe for his neighbor, the worst had happened.

'That part's a relief,' someone else agreed, out there in the dimness.

'No more guns,' someone else moaned. 'All day and all night-pounding, pounding, pounding—'

'Ah,' said Reggie's neighbor in an undertone. 'FBI. I'd've done a funk six weeks ago if I'd been FBI.'

Reggie turned his head, took in the neat moustache and what he could see of the other man's remaining hand, and made a guess.

'Cavalry?' he suggested.

The other finally turned his head and looked at Reggie. 'Most useless waste of man and horseflesh on God's own earth,' the other agreed, and though the voice was cheerful, the bleak expression on the man's face gave it the lie. 'Should have put my horse on a gun-carriage and me in a trench. All we existed for was to be shot to pieces. All they could think to do with us was send us across the wire again and again and let the machine guns have us.'

Reggie winced. The cavalry had not fared well in the war. And the face on the pillow of the bed next to his was, behind its brave moustache, disturbingly young.

'My brother's FBI; told me enough about it before he caught it that I knew I wouldn't last a day,' the youngster continued. 'Thought, since I was a neck-and-nothing rider, I'd try the cavalry. I,' he concluded bitterly, 'was an idiot. All a man on a horse is out there is a grand target.'

'But the worst is over,' Reggie suggested, echoing the young man's own words.

'Oh, yes, the worst is over.' The young man sighed, with a suggestion of a groan in it. 'If I keep telling myself that, I should start believing it soon.'

He blinked owlishly at Reggie, then looked back up at the ceiling; another moment, and his eyelids drooped, and he fell asleep.

Out in the ward, the whispering went on.

'—watched that gas coming closer and closer; couldn't move, didn't dare, had a machine gun above us to get anybody that bolted that took out two of my men that tried—'

'—one minute, passing me a smoke, the next, head gone—'

'—arm sticking out of the trench wall. Men used to give it a handshake as they went past—'

'—sweet Jesus, the smell! If I can just get it out of my nose for a minute—'

'The smell—' Reggie repeated, with complete understanding. No one who had not been in the trenches understood what that meant. He hadn't not really, until he'd been buried in a bunker. One part, the stink of aged mustard gas. One part, stagnant water. One part, rat urine, for the rats were everywhere and only a gas attack got rid of them. One part, unwashed human body, for what was the point of washing when you were standing knee-deep in stagnant water? And one part dead and rotting human flesh. When somebody died, you gathered up as much as you could of him to bury—but sometimes your trenches were dug across an old burial-field, or sometimes, when a bomb or a barrage had hit the trench directly, there were so many bits scattered about that you just cleaned up what you could and dumped what might remain after the stretcher- bearers left into a hole. It wasn't the first time that Reggie had heard a story like the hand and arm sticking out of a trench-wall. Soon enough, you got numb to seeing things like that. Especially if you were in the FBI.

But that stink never left you. It got in your nose, in your hair, lodged in your memory until you couldn't draw a free breath anymore.

Yet his exposure it had been so brief—many of the officers in this ward had lived with it for weeks, months. Maybe they got used to it.

Maybe they just got numb to it.

'Know what the real relief is? Not having to bloody lie to the boys anymore.'

That was another new voice, a tired, tired voice from the other side of his new neighbor. Reggie got himself up on his elbow and peered through the gloom.

It was, indeed, a new man—older than Reggie, old enough to have been Reggie's father, in fact. Oh, God, he thought in sudden recollection. They've raised the conscription