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done everything that could be expected of you. You’re an inspiration.”
    It was the glare of the electric light high above my bed that first hauled me up through many layers of nightmare and dream. Voices came and went like trams. The narrow aisles of the ward were streets, sometimes empty, sometimes bustling with life. I could not at first tell a human voice from the screech of brake or the rattle of rail. I merely had some odd notion that I lay upon an island the traffic avoided.
    Voices faded into the murk. The light blurred, swelled, and spilled into blackness. Then, after some indeterminate time, it returned a little sharper than before. Pain was all around, pain so thick, so searing, I couldn’t understand how the white-clad men and women could move so easily, how they could walk, bend, and wrap and unwrap bandages like those around my feet and forehead, how they could concentrate on anything but the pain. Then I realized the pain was inside me; I had been wrong to assume that it flooded the corridors and reached with endless wings into the world beyond the hospital.
    Once, quite soon after this revelation, I opened my eyes to see a tall, gaunt man with a moustache looking down at me. I thought I recognized him.
    â€œHello, old man,” he said gently, so gently in fact, that I had to wonder for a moment whether this was perhaps my father, whether I was still a child and this was a school sanatorium, not a hospital, whether I had dreamed the war and the years leading up to it. I tried to answer, but my tongue seemed asleep.
    â€œIt’s all right, don’t speak,” he said quickly, colouring around the collar. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m Major Pickard from further up the line. You might remember me.” His grey eyes became evasive and moist. He stopped for a moment. “So many lost,” he said quietly. “I’m sure you must have heard.” He took a breath and straightened himself, taking off his gloves. Through the disinfectant that permeated the ward, I caught the faint scent of leather. “I just wanted to say on behalf of the lads in my platoon, and yours,” he said quietly, as though an aura of sadness or disgrace hung about our outfit. I thought of Charles, smelled his blood again. He knows I killed Charles, I thought. It did not occur to me that his gentleness was at odds with this and that he would not have been speaking so softly had he been aware that I had skewered the life out of a fellow lieutenant. But nothing was obvious to me in those days after my first awakening. The world and everything in it was being sewn together afresh. Had I looked out of a window I would not have been surprised to see the blue of sky upon the ground or a rich loam of grass around the sun. “It was a terrific show,” he continued, “a terrific show.”
    His colour became deeper still and he seemed overcome. Is this what happened in wartime? I wondered. Was there some mechanism in the politics of battle that turned things inside out, making soldiers honour actions they might otherwise admonish? I thought of Smith on the ground, his finger trying to point, his lips attempting a smile. Had Smith known something of this inversion?
    â€œI know it’s not the moment,” said the major, straightening, mouth tight as though preparing to speak before an audience, “but I want you to know, it will not be forgotten.”
    Not…forgotten. Something seeped from my skull and stung the wound beneath my bandage. What could this mean? That I’d be praised now, but that later, at some appointed time, I’d be excluded from the society of men? Dull recollections of ritualized ostracism—white feathers, black billiard balls—came into my mind. Immediately a single anxiety—more vivid by far than anything that had so far emerged from the tangles of my thoughts—formed itself: Does Sarah know I killed Charles?
    I pushed myself