When Gareth went to Cowley Barracks, he left bits of himself behind. His civilian clothes hung ready to wear in our wardrobe. A comb with strands of hair still in its teeth—black and wiry grey—sat on the bathroom sink. By the bed, a collection of poems by Rupert Brooke was open face-down, the spine bent in half. I picked it up to see what poem Gareth had been reading. “The Dead.” I put it down again.

I took refuge in the Scriptorium. How long, I wondered, before the slips began to mention this war?

Ditte had sent me Back of the Front by Phyllis Campbell. I kept it in my desk and would read it when everyone else had left for the day. Her war was so different from the war in the papers.

It is context, Da had always said, that gives meaning.

German soldiers had skewered the babies of Belgian women, she wrote, then raped the women and cut off their breasts.

I thought about all the German scholars whom Dr. Murray consulted about the Germanic etymology of so many English words. They had been silent since the start of the war. Or silenced. Could those gentle men of language do these things? And if a German could commit such acts, why not a Frenchman or an Englishman?

Phyllis Campbell, and women like her, nursed these Belgian women—those who were still alive. They arrived on the backs of trucks, scraps of cloth wrapped around their chests to soak up blood instead of milk, their babies dead at their feet.

My hands shook as I transcribed quotations on slip after slip, heading each with the word war. They added something horrid to the slips already sorted and waiting to be turned into copy. When I was done, I was exhausted. I stood up and searched the shelves for the right pigeon-hole. I took out the slips that were already there and shuffled through them. The slips I had just written would bring something new, something awful, to the meaning of war. But I couldn’t add them. I returned the original slips to the pigeon-hole I’d taken them from, then walked towards the grate. I threw in the quotations from Phyllis Campbell and watched as they became shadows of themselves.

I remembered lily. Back then, I had thought that if I saved the word something of my mother would be remembered. It was not my place to erase what war meant to Phyllis Campbell; what it was to those Belgian women. Among the propaganda of glory, and the men’s experiences of the trenches and death, something needed to be known of what happened to women. I returned to my desk, opened Back of the Front and began again. Once more, I forced each terrible sentence from my trembling pen.