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Sergeant Wickham. The man who glanced nervously toward no-man's-land. The man whose last words Alistair did not recall.

Tomasz made no acknowledgment he had heard. But his grip became somehow more secure, and he continued walking. As they neared the body, Alistair saw the face—or what was left of it. It lay turned in the mud, the expression frozen in a state that was neither peaceful nor in pain, but empty, vacant. The sergeant had never been a remarkable man. He had been competent, nervous, loyal in the way recruits learned to be loyal. And now he was mud, slowly being reabsorbed into the earth.

Behind them, the destroyed trench receded further into the distance and into the past. Around them, the view offered no consolation. The sky was still gray. The wind, when it came, carried the scent of death and the smell of earth that had been violently displaced and had not yet settled.

Somewhere in the distance—or perhaps remarkably close—a man was screaming. The sound was thin and high-pitched. It was the wail of someone who had been screaming for so long, the human voice had begun to deteriorate under the strain. And then it stopped. The silence that followed it was, if possible, worse than the sound itself.

Alistair struggled to pinpoint the moment, but he became aware they were alone. There were no other soldiers in sight, no rescue teams, no stretcher-bearers, no medics rushing to help. It was just him and the giant, moving through desolate slopes and rises, as if they were the last two living things in a place where only the dead belonged.

At some point—it might have been an hour; it might have been minutes—Tomasz slowed his pace. His steps became more deliberate, more careful. Alistair realized they were descending into a shallow ditch. There was water here, a small amount, just a trickle, but enough to suggest the earth had not entirely forgotten how to operate. Tomasz lowered Alistair with an almost reverential amount of care. He set him down in the ditch, keeping one arm underneath Alistair's shoulders, supporting him so his head did not fall backward into the mud.

A canteen appeared, the metal dented and scarred by years of use and war. Tomasz brought it to Alistair's lips. When Alistair drank, the water tasted like iron and earth and something else—something that might have been hope. Although Alistair believed hope dead in him for a long time now. Tomasz's hand, the enormous hand, holding Alistair's head steady, was gentle. The word seemed impossible applied to anything connected to the war, but it was accurate. The hand was—Tomasz was—aware that Alistair's body was fragile and that survival clung by the thinnest of margins. One careless move would push them back into the abyss. The hand did not squash. It cradled.

"Thank you," Alistair whispered. The words felt inadequate, false, a tiny offering in the face of what this man had done. But they were all he had.

Tomasz said nothing. He held Alistair's head, positioned the canteen at his lips, and let him drink until his expression showed that he satisfied his thirst.

"Qui êtes-vous?" Alistair asked. It was a question that required asking, though he was not certain it required answering. Who are you? But the question and its asking held more than that. It contained: Why? Where are we going? What is happening to me? Will I live? Does it matter?

Tomasz was quiet for a long moment. His dark eyes were looking at something beyond the horizon. His massive chest rose and fell with each breath. When he finally moved, it was not to speak. He let out a long sigh. It expressed every mile he traveled, every death he witnessed, and all the losses around them. He readjusted Alistair’s body more fully against the ditch wall, bracing him there with care, and they rested.

After several minutes, he stood, his enormous frame rising, and he reached down. His hands took hold of Alistair's torso once more, and with the same smooth motion as before, he lifted him. Carried him up out of the ditch. Positioned him across his shoulder again.

The answer lay in the motion itself, in the act of continuing. Tomasz paused to give water, holding him gently. Now, he moved forward, carrying him deeper into the morning fog, which rose from the earth like something being set free.

They walked on, the distance gradually dissolving into mist around them. The fences and landmarks they passed became increasingly faint, shadows of shadows. The bodies of men and horses alike became mere suggestions, shapes glimpsed and then lost.

They approached a stand of trees, and the view closed in around them. When Alistair looked back, all he saw was fog and a hint of the ruined field they crossed. Looking ahead, he saw only the endless forest, shadows within shadows, the ground rough with fallen trees and muddy puddles. The sound of their footsteps seemed to come from a different world, distant and unreal.

Alistair looked up at Tomasz's profile. He noticed Tomasz's jaw clenched and his dark eyes focused on a goal ahead. The man was huge and incredibly strong. His steps never faltered or wavered. He moved as if he carried nothing at all. Alistair’s weight seemed insignificant compared to what he bore. He felt the bearing of survival, the harshness of the terrain, and all the choices that brought him to this moment, this forest, this impossible passage.

The fog closed around them like a hand, a mercy. Alistair, suspended across Tomasz's shoulder, gratefully watched the fog swallow the countryside. His small body was held by the tremendous strength of this man who had no reason to save him, yet had merely found him, lifted him, and continued walking. The pain was still there, and it would always be. But it was no longer all he was.

The trees swallowed them. Their combined silhouette merged against the smoke-hazed horizon. They had merged into a single shape now, a unified form moving through the ruin with the inevitability of gravity. Behind them, the field lay empty and still. Ahead, somewhere in the distance, somewhere beyond the twisted wood and the fog, there had to be something else. Something that was not this. Something that was not death and mud and the smell of decay. Tomasz seemed to believe in it, and so Alistair allowed himself the luxury of hope. It was barely hope at all, really, but the refusal to stop breathing, the acceptance that he was being carried, and that being carried was, for now, enough.

Chapter 2 - The Campsite

The camp announced itself first through its aroma. It carried the scent of burning fabric, spilled supplies, and the distinct aura of hasty abandonment, rather than the fresh stench of death they had been moving through for hours. Alistair's eyes, which had been drifting in and out of focus, snapped open as Tomasz's pace slowed. The fog began to lift. The view opened before them into a hollow depression, and in that depression lay the wreckage of a campsite. Burned tents with their canvas blackened collapsed in on themselves. Scattered belongings lay everywhere: a boot, a cup, and something that may have been a letter. The ink ran together, obscured by exposure to rain and snow. A mess kit smashed beyond usability. A helmet with a hole punched clean through the crown. Alistair's small body tensed against Tomasz's chest. His hands gripped the larger man's coat with urgency.

He then saw it: a French flag. The tricolor lay half-buried in mud near a collapsed supply shed. It looked trampled, as if someone ground it into the earth with their boots. The white of it was the color of old bone now, the red faded to something between rust and dried blood, the blue nearly black with accumulated filth.

The understanding arrived gradually, seeping in like groundwater. This was no ordinary debris field. This was his own. It had once been his. Tomasz's breathing changed, confirming it. His breaths deepened, becoming more like a stifled response to disaster. His camp, his men, his entire world, all reduced to ashes and scattered debris.

Tomasz rolled Alistair from his shoulder and dropped him in a heap next to the skeleton of a charred, shredded tent. Then, he stood still, his tall frame outlined against the gray sky, gazing at the camp.

The officer managed to push himself backward and prop his spine against a pole that somehow stayed embedded upright in the soft earth. He could see the camp a little better from this position. It was a line of five or six tents, each in a different state of ruin, partially concealed by a row of bushes. He was not immediately able to discern the camp’s function.

The tent he leaned on was the most structurally complete, though its walls had been torn away. To his left, there was a single upright pole surrounded by a tangled mass of wet canvas, mud, ropes, and likely a few dead Frenchmen, or parts of them, anyway.

The next tent was partially collapsed; a dark gray mass of fabric draped over two central posts. The edges flapped slowly in the breeze, giving it just a hint of movement. The pain was getting into Alistair’s mind, and the way the structure swayed reminded him of a wild elephant, or more precisely the ghost of one, lumbering towards him.

Further down from the fiendish creature, everything was scorched and flattened, with various lumps and protrusions visible under the canvas. Alistair could not be certain if there were two or three more tents, but he was confident more dead lay underneath.

He saw something shift in Tomasz's face. His jaw tightened, and the corners of his eyes drew in, but his expression stayed calm. It was his body that revealed his struggle. A tremor returned to his hands. His shoulders hunched inward, making him seem smaller, as if he wanted to disappear for a moment.

He approached a dead soldier who lay face down. Alistair could not see it all from where he sat. Only a part was visible. An eagle pin on his collar marked him as Polish, Haller’s Blue Army. His position suggested he had not died instantly. He must have dragged himself a few dozen meters before ultimately expiring. Tomasz knelt beside him, his enormous frame folding like a hinge. And there, in that gesture, was something that Alistair had not seen before: he crossed himself. His right hand moved slowly, tracing the cross from forehead to chest, then to the left shoulder and right. His fingers paused on his chest, as if holding something inside that might escape if he let go. His lips moved, and Alistair heard nothing, but he understood the ritual.

Tomasz removed the eagle pin and slid it into his pocket. When he stood, his barrel chest heaved an exhalation, and his eyes turned skyward. Something inside him shifted. The paralysis broke. The knowledge had been absorbed.