Wandering this way and that through his round-ceilinged trenches set deep into the grass, he played at soldiers, one of the new-made recruits now slumping forward while standing with his hands over his steel belly, bowing grimly forward, his snout dripping sand-grains like tears; beside him, a soldier whose hands were visegrips stared at his god with a doglike look, as if he could possibly hope for something. But the Trench Ghost barely paid attention, because the sunset clouds now put him in mind of the way that some bronze helmets express verdigris in beautiful patches of turquoise and white, still leaving the bronze color here and there. Emerging from an embrasure, he hovered over his trenches’ round spines. There was lichen on them, and moss. Ivy climbed the lovely trees below them. He wandered down there in order to look back up at the skyline where his trenches lay invisibly. He listened to a blackbird. He was alone in the young forest. He liked to look up and count leaf-shadows. Soon he had gone all the way to the boundary, which was a certain helmet-topped grave.
He declined to believe that this was all there could be. Another slow-growing oak spread its arms above and away from the trench.
The smell of wild thyme, the ugly rounded galleries black-lichened and crackling, the pools of rainwater rapidly sinking into the karst meadow, these entered his essence, and so he carried the enemy general and his own lieutenant-general out into the sunlight, to warm them and see how they were affected, but they never did anything. He exhaled upon them very slowly. They faced off, and began to fight to the death, while he floated into the new forest, just above the railroad tracks, keeping exactly between the two tracks in the deep rock-groove there at Redipuglia. He picked a leaf and watched it fall. He stared into the sun. Looking about him, he decided: I am not this.
The Venus-crowned hairpin grew warm. Presently she tumbled out of his heart. Leaving her in the grass, he said to himself: She does not pertain to me.
Returning to his toy combatants, he found the enemy general standing atop the lieutenant-general’s decapitated remains. Although the latter continued to struggle, as insects often will even after central ganglia have been removed, its motions were to little purpose. The Trench Ghost lifted the enemy general away. Angrily, it stabbed him in the leg. The Trench Ghost felt vaguely proud. Surely whatever he was had to do with this place in which he had found himself and these things he had made.
Since he could see through dirt and rock, he found a round-cheeked child’s head made of marble — her nose broken off, her cheeks pitted — and a one-armed naked marble soldier who held his chin high. He left them underground, reasoning: They too have nothing to do with me.
Wandering through the reinforced connecting tunnels, he gazed up past the concrete and counted the roots of the young oaks and wild thyme bushes. From his visits to the mass grave he remembered brass epaulettes with gilded tentacles, a corroded canteen in a woven sack whose fibers now were atoms, a scrap of ribcage, a cross attached to a ribbon of gelato-colored stripes, and a blue case of visiting cards which to anyone else would have looked like mud. More roots groped deep through all that. He posited that things which grow downward might somehow relate to him.
Looking up between the inclined rusty rails of an artillery carriage (cannone da 149G, projectile weight thirty-five kilograms, maximum distance nine point three kilometers), he seemed to remember a sergeant inserting a child’s head into the barrel’s loading-hole, or perhaps only a loaded shell had gone in; and then two soldiers had manipulated the great wheel against the recoil-springs, in the name of great Madre Italia. Another memory appeared to be wedged behind the angled slabs of metal. In Trieste a woman was rising away from him, lifting her lips from the earth. Perhaps she was the one who had once lain beside him under the blue curtain. Then an Austrian shell was caressing a church whose wall-shards danced marble-white and bare-breasted like Nereids. He knew how the great barrel moved in its track; he had seen its birth from a vertical ovoid slit, and when the gun began to fire, destroying over months the pines that the Austrians had planted in better days, he had been there, too, all over the strategic zone demarcated by Peteans, Isonzo and Sdraussina.
He could not realize anything beyond all that, until one night when he was playing at soldiers, all the gamepieces on both sides attacked him. Smiling, still supposing that he was proud of them, he swiggled himself down, and permitted them to stab, cut and shoot his flesh, until he sent them to sleep with a long puff of breath. Then he said to himself: That they who come from me did this to me implies something about me. Yes, I’m sure that’s so.
Then he removed himself, standing alone like a machine gun lost in the grass.
People who think they know about ghosts often suppose that a ghost is tied to its place of death, burial or unwholesome love attachment; and while this may well be the rule, as evidenced by the famous Moaning Lady whom I hear in the next room whenever I visit my favorite whorehouse, the Trench Ghost remained as free, in his own estimation, as you or I; so presently, in the interests of discovering who else he might be, he flew north, where the blue-grey sea showed itself through the slit windows in the concrete pillboxes at Tungesnes, which naturally means Tongue Ness; and here the rounded blackened foredomes of old Nazi bunkers awaited the Allies who had tricked them by landing at Normandie instead. The rusty iron rebar pleased the Trench Ghost; it resembled sunset at Redipuglia. Belowground the ceilings were sometimes brilliantly corroded ribbons of steel, sometimes simply concrete, which stank far worse than his trenches; certainly all these chambers were fouler than the nearby Viking graves. Of course not every corpse had been disinterred, much less every beetle-ridden scrap of yellow-grey bone. But that wasn’t the reason it stank.
One autumn my friend Arild took me here, so that I could write this for you; thus I seem to see our Trench Ghost settling in the planked underchamber on whose ceiling huge brown spiders, slumbering, were awakened by Arild’s flashlight, and writhed furiously, as if about to plop down on our heads. We found cylinders of what might have been poison gas; and if that is what it was, the Trench Ghost must have been happy, because Germans were even better at the manufacture of that than Italians.
A guru once advised me: Find what is it that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of “I.” So I looked and looked; I hoped to discover the Trench Ghost, or at least to learn what his name might be — for it has always struck me that one defines oneself in part by naming others. What did he call himself, or what should I call him? — Arild said: From what I’ve read, ghosts cannot name anything. That’s one of the things that keep them dead.
In the rubber waders that my friend provided, following his flashlight, slopping in stinking mud or clambering over some farmer’s rotting pallets, I descended various flights of concrete stairs to where the grasses and flowers ended, then came into the entrance tunnel which soon angled sharply right, then straight, then left, then straight again, to make it easier for the defenders to knock an intruder on the head. I groaned, then hooted like an owl; but the Trench Ghost did not reply. Each bunker was different, probably so that intruders could make no plan. And in each bunker, my painful feeling worsened. It was a nastiness in the chest, foul and cold, wet and evil; I could not get enough air. Failing to find the Trench Ghost (although Arild promised that he had seen him), I returned out into the sweet smell of manure and moss.