Sam was sitting up, eating his dinner. He looked familiar, but only in the way of someone I might have passed a few times in the street. I introduced myself, and he beamed up at me. His right leg was elevated under the covers.

“Foot’s gone,” he said, with no more emotion than if he was telling me the time. “Ain’t nothing compared to what I seen.”

Neither of us wanted to talk about what he’d seen. Without a pause he began talking about the Press and asking after anyone we might know in common. I’d paid very little attention to all the apron-clad lads trundling between paper store, printing room, bindery and dispatch, and I couldn’t say who remained and who had gone. “I could tell you who’s gone,” he said, with the same dispassionate tone he’d used to inform me about his foot. Then he told me the name and role of each boy he knew had died. It was monotonous in its detail, and he barely took a breath. But he needed to recall them, and as he did I imagined the paths they’d once traversed over a single day as threads stitching the different parts of the Press together. How could it function without them?

“That’s all of them,” he said, as if the inventory had been of stores or equipment, and not of men. He looked at me then and grinned. “Gareth, I mean Lieutenant Owen, says you like to collect words.” He registered the surprise on my face. “I reckon I might have one that the Dictionary don’t know.”

I took out a slip and a pencil.

“Bumf,” said Sam.

“Can you put it in a sentence?” I asked.

Someone chimed in from across the ward: “You do know what a sentence is, don’t you, Tinka?”

“Why do they call you Tinka?”

“Shot himself in the foot tinkerin’ with his rifle,” said the man in the bed next to Sam’s. “Some do it on purpose.”

Sam made no response, but turned and said quietly to me, “Hand me them leaflets; I need some bumf for the latrine.”

It took me a while to realise he was providing the sentence I’d asked for. I wrote it on the slip and added his name. “Why bumf? Where does it come from?” I asked.

“I probably shouldn’t say, Mrs. Owen.”

“Call me Esme. And don’t be afraid of offending me, Sam. I know more crass words than you could imagine.”

He smiled and said, “Bum fodder. There’s plenty of it comes from headquarters. Not worth reading but worth its weight in gold when you got the runs. Sorry, missus.”

“I got a word, miss,” another man shouted.

“And me.”