They talked about mutual acquaintances, popular novels, rumors of a spring offensive. Then, as if to seal the friendship, Child extracted two thin Dutch cigars he'd been saving. "My father sent them, although I can't imagine why, since I never used to smoke them."

"Maybe he thought it was time you started. Now that you're a warrior." A nice light moment. Then, offering the light cupped in his hands, Gray realized that Child's father had played a rather filthy joke, a ludicrous exploding cigar . . . except that it wasn't actually the cigar that exploded, but the top of Child's head—lifting almost gracefully high above the parapet.

Gray caught him as he fell, easing him to the duckboards, then cradling him in his arms. He shouted twice for a medical orderly but knew it was hopeless. All these years he had thought that brains were somehow a poetical figment, like broken hearts and cold blood, and yet here were bits of Child's brains splattered on the wall of the trench. On him.

He actually took a while to die: ten or fifteen minutes. He remained exceptionally still, breathing softly, his face pressed deep, deep into his friend Nicholas Gray's stomach.

After that, Gray began to fight the war in earnest. He would usually start at about midnight, with half a dozen men in a forward dugout off the firebay. There were nervous jokes as the raiding parties prepared themselves: shedding regimental patches, excess webbing, ration books, and shoulder flashes. Then silence as the weapons were distributed: truncheons and revolvers, knobkerries, bowie knives, and those jam-pot bombs.

From the dugout they would move along the firebay into a forward sap, then wait, listening for a moment before slipping through a gap in the wire. The first fifty yards were the most critical and had to be crossed quickly in order to minimize the risk of getting caught in a flare. Then came the high grass and a slow belly-crawl, with only brief pauses in shell craters.

There were corpses on the middle ground, casualties from a summer assault, and rats in the furrows. Even the night winds clattering over the brow of the ridge failed to carry off the stench. In the event of flares one could lie still among the bodies. Closer to the German lines the ground was usually moist, smelling of leaf mold and soaking their uniforms.

One usually saw the sentries first: heads and shoulders above the parapet, rifles resting in the crooks of the arm. Then there were odors of coffee and cheap tobacco, echoes of bootheels on the duck-boards. Occasionally one did not see them until the last ten or fifteen yards, when they would appear suddenly, looming up like specters.