Three dozen meters beneath the deepest trench lay a Roman marble fragment depicting an almost faceless hero on his rearing horse, the enemy’s horse crouching and trampled. The Trench Ghost used to sink down to it and gloat. He knew what murder was, and wished to drink the pride which comes of killing others in public, at risk to oneself, at times when killing or perishing is exactly what one’s leaders call for. In the beginning the Trench Ghost did not wish that the hero possessed a face. Why wouldn’t his own serve? So one twilight he flitted out of the emplacements and down through the trees to the little stream, in hopes of seeing his own reflection. He could not. After that, he began to consider faces. Beneath a concrete slab laid down in 1915 and forgotten long before the end of the war there lay a certain neighbor of his, a grey skull all alone, which the Trench Ghost used to take between his hands as if it were a crystal ball, staring into its mud-choked eyes. Wondering whether his face resembled this, he scrolled his hands across his forehead and down his cheeks, but never could decide whether to let his fingers pass through himself; hence his investigations dwindled into inconsistency. He seemed to be hairy, gristly and bony, but then again, there might be nothing to him. Sometimes he envied the skull, for being neither more nor less than what it was, and often he hated it.
He decided that if he could not know what he was, he might as well become a general. Deploying other creatures for some purpose external to them seemed grand; he might even fulfill himself thus. The cool, slippery trench with its many windings and its arched ceiling like a concrete debasement of Roman ruins was world enough in which to enact the noblest dramas. Gaunt as a mummy, with his legs worn down to bones, he began arraying his soldiers against each other. What the rare living visitors (mourners, students, lovers, sensation-seekers en route to Aquileia or Cividale) recoiled from as a deep belly-crawl of arched tunnel descending beyond those few half-lit galleries in which their shoes stayed clean, the Trench Ghost slid into as easily as an otter, right up to his chest in solid dirt; that way he could lay out his toys without bending over. The foremost of his gamepieces was a Venus-crowned hairpin made of bone; she, who must have been a thousand years old, began as his lieutenant-general, inspiring the others, who dared not retreat once he had pierced her into the mud, for her slender, yellow-green form was severe, her breasts hard, her tiny face resolute no matter whether the Trench Ghost had established her straight or crookedly. Immediately subordinate in rank came those Bronze Age figurines already described; as they drifted in and out of favor, he made them right or wrong, slaves or enemies. Who ought to lead the foes was a matter which gradually improved his mind; it would have been facile enough, as indeed he had done for some decades, simply to move them about, like a miser laying down gold coins; but in time even the Trench Ghost began to wonder what war was for; hence he decided to establish beyond his mere purpose an outright cause, relating to the conquest of evil; every martial monument on the battlefield cherished that as its engraved excuse! So which of his creatures should he define as wicked, and why? He meant to defeat them over and over, forever; hence they had to be sturdy and patient, perhaps even beautiful in their way; his cause required him to hate them, but not so vehemently as to destroy them, because then what would he do with himself? — Good Trench Ghost, he was already facing down eternity! — For the first half-century or so he satisfied himself with leaving them general-less. It sufficed that he swept them down. But presently he grew as unsatisfied with such easy victories as Hitler felt after his unopposed annexation of Czechoslovakia; and that was when he discovered another of his own qualities: He could make things.
Once upon a time, when men writhed and died in the trenches of Redipuglia, there had been fine weather, at least for a Trench Ghost: a birdsong of alarm whistles melodified the forest (which of course got wrecked and flattened — the reason that the current trees had achieved no great girth as yet); and steel butterflies of shell fragments flew up to complete this delightful picture. With almost none of a vampire’s helpless obsessiveness when put to counting grains of rice until sunrise, the Trench Ghost began to gather souvenir scraps of metal. As his ambitions grew, so did his powers. He could bite a piece of copper, iron or even case-hardened steel neatly in two. He could fold down rough edges, and pinch them as smooth as piecrust-dough. By breathing on his subsections, he could adhere them to each other better than if they’d been soldered. Before long he had made himself tiny saws, files, sanders and scrapers. Whenever he had assembled another toy, he carried it into the mass grave over by the monument. This dark place, horrid to you or me, always revitalized the Trench Ghost. Furthermore, some exudation of the sad mud at its center possessed the quality of fixing any metal with a black and durable finish.
I confess the possibility that the Trench Ghost lacked any power at all over material things, in which case he was simply an insane hallucinator. But the loneliness of God makes for no story in and of itself. That is why our scribes added people to the Bible. In this story of the Trench Ghost I have likewise thought fit to let him do this or that, because otherwise the actual desperation of the eternally aware yet powerless dead might distress you who live; anyhow, I cannot prove that what he perceived himself as doing was not actually being done. So let’s agree that he made a spider-legged little iron knight, who became one of his most determined captains. For the knight’s antagonist he now constructed a puppet of flat black plates whose arm-edges were sharper than razors and whose legs were as those of a machine-gun tripod. In enemy pairs he made them, tiny metal figures whose heads were frequently ejected shells and whose hands were vises or triggers (some also had tongs for hands). Unlike the works of modern factories, his differed individually, even if their functions and destinies bore one flavor. Deep underground he brushed past a grubby feminine figure who was half emerging from her marble stele in the third century before Christ and had still gotten no farther. He did not wonder who she was, but he considered how he could use her. His intelligence failed him there, for he was merely a Trench Ghost; hence he floated away and constructed his own counterpart, the enemy generaclass="underline" tall and black in form, a narrow triangle of metal with many grooves and knurlings on its surface; its springloaded razor-wrists folded prayerfully in, its many-jointed legs drawn up ready to leap; on its head a black helmet, in its eyes cruel determination without understanding; its mouth a sawtoothed groove.