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outstretched hand and then gently placed her fingertips against his palm and pushed it back at him. “I’m sorry she died,” Margaret said. She reached her hand through the window and brushed it against the child’s copper-colored head in its sling. She smiled at him, a beautiful smile, like a dream in passing. Then the driver backed up and swung around them, leaving Henry Bright and his livestock to stand dumb, dirty, and still in the rising heat of the afternoon.

16
     
    The concussive shock of the first shell hitting the church was the only one Bright actually felt. After that came the now-familiar feeling of capsized calm in which the world seemed viewed from beneath a great depth of water. It was as if all sound and feeling were gone suddenly, and, within that watery silence, death was not something hurtled from above but more like a meadow of wildflowers that blossomed from the ground in radii of plaster, mud, and dust, swallowing buildings and bodies, chewing them in the air a while and then spitting them back out upon the trammeled ground like the ends of gnawed bones. When the flowers finally stopped blossoming, the earth lay back down again and the senses returned.
    After several minutes he began to pick his way through the church rubble in search of the others. Bert and Sergeant Carlson were the only ones that he found alive. Carlson lay next to an avalanche of roofing tile by the enormous splinter of the fallen steeple. He had a hole in his chest that had not yet begun to bleed but hung open in an “O” that looked like a mouth that was about to start screaming. He was breathing, but that was all. Bert was unhurt, though his pale face was pocked with plaster and his eyes were wide and shiny.
    “That was really something, huh? Wow!” he said. “I mean, wow!”
    Bright stooped next to Carlson. “Help me.”
    “You bet!” Bert said, but he didn’t move. “How you doin’, Sergeant? Don’t you worry none, you hear me? You’re doin’ real good, real good!” He laughed to himself in disbelief. “Jee-roosh! We had a tight one today, didn’t we, boys?” He was staring at the bodies scattered about; his brow was furrowing and unfurrowing. “Jee-roosh!” he said again. He began to shake.
    “Help me,” Bright said again, but Bert’s whole body was now convulsing in some no-man’s-land between laughter and sobs. Bright stood, hauled back, and hit Bert hard with the flat of his hand. “Help me,” he said one last time, and Bert’s eyes focused and he stopped shaking so much. “We need to move him someplace safe,” Bright said. The sergeant’s wound had finally begun to bleed.
    It was terrible ground to try to carry a man over, and Carlson’s feet shambled loosely against the pebble and debris as his legs began the process of forgetting how to walk. They passed the ruins of the church and had made it about a hundred yards down the road before Bright began to wonder if he’d been turned around by the shellings. Without the steeple it was hard to tell, suddenly, which direction they had first entered the village by. It was also beginning to get dark, and so he pulled Bert and the sergeant to the side of the road and down into a ditch by a stone wall. The hate had begun now, and stretching away for miles to either side of them came the sounds of the War.
    Artillery passed high above their heads in singsong trajectories that merged and lifted with one another into strange musical chords, like cats crossing pump organs. The gigantic trench mortars were the loudest, the reverberations of their fusillades abating slowly across the night sky, briefly disappearing behindthe sound of howitzers before the red-hot shards of metal they had fired into the air came screaming earthward once more.
    “We’ll go back to the line tonight,” he said to Bert. “After dark.” They angled Carlson into a sitting position against the wall and Bright put his ear close to the dying man. The sergeant’s wound