For years he contented himself with posing his toy soldiers as would a child, lining them up; they were stiff, still and ready, and came to appear quite smart together; even those new black steel troopers had begun to go green-verdigrised, following after their elder brothers and sisters, the bronze figurines. Sometimes he employed the ammunition-holes in the wall to sort them in; as the two armies grew, he began to classify the pieces more whimsically; one night it might be all bronze figurines on one side and steel ones on the other; or perhaps the bronze entities called out to be officers on both sides, after which he was sure to humiliate them by putting the steel creatures in charge for the next round. And as he played these sad games, he imagined that the trenches around him were his home. He thought: All here is mine. He decided: No general is greater than I.
Before the youngest oaks had thickened, he discovered that if he held each toy soldier to his heart, it would come to life, or at least enter a state which appeared alive to its maker. I wish you could have seen those black many-legged things fighting, falling back before this or that steel officer as if some horseheaded demon were sweeping them away! To the Trench Ghost it was a particular treat to watch that enemy general, the puppet of flat black plates, swinging up its jointed, sharp-edged iron arm, like the legs of a machine-gun tripod. To oppose that entity and assist the cause of good, he now constructed another grinning verdigrised monster with splayed frog-legs; it could leap and bite most desperately, and its cheeks were sharper than scalpels. For an expression the Trench Ghost awarded it whatever he had seen in the eyes of that grey skull beneath the slab from 1915. After that he fashioned springtailed dragon soldiers, gendarmes whose helmets he roweled like cowboy spurs, beetle-browed metal infantry, shock troops who could roll forward on wheeled leaden plinths, brass corporals whose jaws happened to dwell in their chests, tapering-headed sappers no wider than Maxim cartridges, executioner queens whose skirts rushed open like skeletal umbrellas just before they worried enemies in half with their sawtoothed thighs, caterpillar-legged Alpine troops. The enemy general, of course, was the most impressively malevolent of all these toys. With each match he became more ferocious, and in this the other soldiers followed him. At first they used to knock each other down with clattering little scissors-kicks, or hurl each other waist-high against the concrete walls; by and by they learned the arts of charging, smashing and dismembering. Whenever a battle was concluded, there rose up in that dark and mucky tunnel a faint hissing or whistling or crackling. The victorious troops were cheering! Then, when the Trench Ghost flew over his miniature battlefield, breathing gusts of fog down upon their broken parts, they clanged back together again, ready for the next war.
Only the Venus-crowned hairpin refused to live. He attempted different exhalations and even foggy whispers, but could not reach her. Hence he fashioned a new steel lieutenant-general in her place. Not knowing why he did so, he pierced the Venus deep inside himself, until her face barely protruded from between his ribs. He swiveled her around in his heart so that she was always looking up at him. After that he felt a sensation of tenderness, as if he were a mother suckling her baby.
By now he felt, as most of us do, that he ruled his own doom; hence the future would be ever grander. And in this optimistic spirit the Trench Ghost taught the enemy general the art of the phalanx. All the troops already knew trench warfare. And they dug in, scrabbling grooves into the concrete with their bladed hands. Soon they began to make their own weapons.
Carrying the enemy general down under the concrete, the Trench Ghost showed him an unexploded cylinder of mustard gas. The little creature understood, and grinned with all his teeth.
His troops could not yet travel to mine their raw materials, so he brought them whatever they wished; in Redipuglia there is plenty of everything. He was beneficent; he built them a tiny smelter and a machine shop the size of a cigarette carton; they played fairly, and took turns, while the Trench Ghost reinspected that old memory he had of almost seeing a waving white curtain going blue in late summer Adriatic light. This picture did not lead to anything. By now the two lines were launching tiny projectiles at each other. Their bombs were no larger than matchheads, but that sufficed to blow up those brave little fellows. They screamed or buzzed when they were struck, and cheered when they did the striking. Their machine guns stridulated as sweetly as crickets; and when they rushed out of their hand-grooved trenchlets in hopes of seizing each other’s positions, their fierce-shining gazes were as pleasant to the Trench Ghost as I myself find the yellow-pupilled compound eyes of the pink hydrangeas in Trieste.
Now it began to happen that the enemy general would conquer the Trench Ghost’s troops, and pose upon that mound of dead metal skulls, with the splayed legs and upraised arms of a gladiator triumphing over his victim. Whenever the Trench Ghost won, he allowed his new lieutenant-general to take the credit, and then that metallic personage would preen himself like a flame-winged red-ocher demon painted on plaster. He too got stronger and crueler. By the time the oak trees got taller, the armies fought finely without any guidance from their maker. They still needed him to breathe them back into coherence after they were broken.
Another dawn whose cloud-grey was bluer than the machine guns had ever been, even when they were new, surprised the Trench Ghost into a sort of flush, as if he had been caught at something, or, far less likely, as if some spirit-fever had caressed the back of his neck; and once yellow lagoons of light began to afflict him from between those clouds, he felt still warmer, and sank down into the black mud below the concrete, where not even winter frogs could go. There he lay like a small child pretending to be asleep. Successive moments suffused and departed him no more quickly than they would have for you and me. Therefore, on account of his immortal consciousness, they tortured him. But he had long since learned how to be mad. All day, and each day, he suffered without understanding, which was how he endured it. At night, fancying himself refreshed, he rose up into his own sort of church where high barrels of thought once aimed outward, greyly shining.
The Trench Ghost’s victories brought him no increase in the introspective joys he already experienced (drifting above his battles, he wore the dreamy smile of a Nereid in the arms of a feminine deity). As for his defeats, they neither soured him against the enemy general, whom he never thought to name, nor did they give him any pride in the intelligence of his creation. Perhaps it would be best to say that they made him wonder what else he might do. There were evenings when his two armies ranked upon their separate window-ledges awaited his pleasure, while he existed elsewhere, experiencing that cool dank dampness deep within the hollow of his heart. Lolling in his high window seat, looking through the white-arched embrasures into the sunny forest, he learned, then forgot, how twig-shadows twitched upon the pale tan earth at breast height. It was mid-morning, the rectangular window now sighting on gravel, grass and leaves. He seemed to remember the cool moldy smell of a certain old church whose Madonna elongated herself into near-phantasmic proportions. He was gazing up above the altar’s fresh flowers to the Crucified One eternally perishing; and behind Him the daylight, white as linen, glowed through the three tall slit-windows. The Trench Ghost experienced something more refined than pleasure. He nearly flitted into the forest. He felt an impulse to pick flowers and lay them here.