They lay first in the air where their dying seemed to make a skin of them, and then in the earth where only a vagrant odor, passing through one’s nostrils like a shiver, served to say they were breathing; and as these dead decayed like seeds sown in a drill, they grew to resemble their grandfathers—marvelously framed and similarly pale—and then their forebears at an even greater and more simian remove and reach of time, till finally they became as naked and innocent as Adam, thin as a thought, smooth and incorruptible at last, as it was written originally in their own book. We lie with the Fates from our first conception; for it is said—and truly too—that the flesh is built up over the bones at birth by the caresses of those star-guarding harlots whose pawed passage clings there like a cloth, just as the soul in our life is the silted delta of the senses, their accumulated fat; and it is Clotho whose touch becomes our tissue, and Atropos who trims it to the shape we’ll take, and Lachesis who then stitches it about us like a shroud; so when we go to ground, as eventually we must, we lose our lusts with our linens, arising on the last day as clean and shriven as the one on which we were begot. Consequently the Boche took out the teeth because they were the bones that bite, that inform, that dream; and which bone, indeed, do we dream with if not the dream-bone? yes, the bone which Moses blew to dream the Lord. No gold-filled molar has a majesty to match it. Dice made of dream-bones rattle in the dice box; throw down a pair of tyrants shaped as double dots; cast Christ’s lot; toss out a series of sevens or those boxcars Jews were packed in. And I remember that soldier’s hand sticking out of my shellslide like a shrub. There was a pale ring where his ring had been, and his cold blue nails were chewed. The earth slid slowly over us, I remember, and I survived because my nose was shoved in a coffee can, like Pooh’s in his honey pot, by the stealthy mud; consequently I could use that lucky tin lung to huff and puff in while I kicked, flailed, and flopped sufficiently to unboat and unbury myself. By the time the rain had sluiced me clean, and I had huddled in an open space, regardless of rifles, gasping as though I were still in the whale, and feeling grateful for a sky couldn’t see, the other soldier had been covered many hours, hours before I took hold of his stiff exclaiming fingers and saw he’d been already robbed. Such was the substance and the symbol of that adventure, and I realize now that sums are what I most remember upshots if I remember

shot shot shot

anything—the quality of additions what anything amounts to. History is just

shot

such a sum; the upshots of upshots. For what is not a sum is not in history,