The Casualties

The war went on. After each battle, the casualties were laid side by side beside the pit. Their handlers, the men who had fetched them from the field and medic’s station, rested on the mound of dirt exhumed from the pit, smoking cigarettes, choking on stale biscuits. Sewn inside their canvas coffins, the casualties looked like a regiment of bedrolls. Flies buzzed and spiraled from lump to lump. The sun was like a hot glob of melting candy. The sky was grey and green from the shelling, thick with ash.

The casualties were not permitted to be buried until the Inspector came by and verified their deaths. A mere formality. Bureaucracy inspired by some odd, unknown precedent. Even the Inspector mocked his own function. A child could tell these men are dead, he liked to say.

For this reason, the handlers called the Inspector the Child. Waiting for the Child, they called their brief respite slumped in the mud with their hand rolls and hardtack. Child’s play, they labeled the Inspector’s work. The Child is coming, they’d say when they saw the dust cloud kicked up by the Inspector and his approaching horse. They meant no harm by it. The Inspector was not an unlikable guy. Sometimes he’d smoke with them and join in on the stories of women they’d loved and the stupid things they’d done during epic bouts of drinking. If it had been a particularly brutal battle, sometimes he’d even help the men bear the dead down into the pit after he’d confirmed none of them still lived. They were all victims of the war in their own way, bedraggled, exhausted men shuffling through a morbid routine.

One day, the handlers, bored and sick of their work, decided to play a trick on the Inspector. When they saw him coming, one of them lay down among the casualties and covered himself with a sheet. The Inspector dismounted and handed the reins of his horse to one of the men. Then he proceeded down the line of bodies, prodding each in the foot in a perfunctory manner with the low-voltage electric rod he carried for that purpose. When he prodded the pretending handler, the man sat up with an overwrought groan and his peers burst into laughter. Startled, the Inspector yanked a pistol from his belt and shot the man three times in the chest. The Inspector’s horse bucked and whinnied at the report. The handler collapsed back among the casualties. The laughter of his peers turned to gasps of horror.

The Inspector holstered his pistol and continued down the line of bodies with his prod. When he finished, one of the handlers said, Inspector, that man you shot. He wasn’t one of them. That was George.

The Inspector pulled his cap from his head and wiped the sweat from his neck with it. They are all Georges, you idiots, he said. Don’t you know it’s my duty to ensure you morons don’t bury a living man?

He mounted his horse and unholstered his gun again and pointed it at each of them. It would be best to help men so eager to cavort among the dead along their way, he said, more to himself than to anyone else. Then he left them to their work.

After this, they stopped calling him the Child. They stopped addressing him or speaking about him altogether. When he came to do his duty, they abandoned their biscuits and cigarettes and stood at silent attention, shovels in hand. His presence was like the resurgence of an unwanted memory. They knew there must be a name for the thing they’d witnessed, but they didn’t try to name it, since, as the war kept coming, they knew it was also something within themselves.