As for the farewell itself, with its tears and promises, memory failed entirely though the days before his departure were clear enough. There was his mother, of course, with her fussing, fretting and breaking down in tears at odd moments: overseeing his younger brother cranking pulpy laundered clothes through the tight crush of the rusty mangle, face crimsoned and shoulder taut, a joint cracking softly with each strained revolution; or chatting with the butcher who looked at her with greater gentleness than usual, a staccato DUNK, DUNK, DUNK of an apprentice audible from an unseen room. Her chin raised as always and the pitch and pace of her words strangely elevated in a way only he and his brother would understand. There were parties held in their narrow basement home, small-scale affairs with the neighbours when his mother commanded the dusty, wall-papered front room with the brisk, clipped command of a Junker dowager snapping decrees, speaking faster than her wont, her spirits unnaturally high. “Oh, please don’t…. and we’re just so proud, oh look at him!” she would say, so proud of him now. At these confined matinees where the pink slabs of ham and red wine tasted featureless and the chipped crockery and the powdery ash in the bare fireplace looked oddly brighter, richer than usual, he noticed the other mothers and their adolescent children, inhabitants of those windy, crowded lanes with their guttering, bubbling ooze and whip-crack washing lines. They sipped, they chewed slowly – the older lads and greying men gently tapping or stubbing out cigarettes – their eyes flicking sideways to watch him, peering at him beneath the low kitchen doorway or in the hazy, crazed pane of the mantel mirror, their complexions stilled in yellow gaslight, rows of teeth just visible. But the send-off itself? At the station? Yes, where else but there on platform one, in that stinging wind under the high rusted awning with its barbed pigeon’s nest, abandoned for many seasons. But dredging the dark pit of memory for detail presented nothing of the quick anxious words, fusty reek of coats on backs or other essentials of that lost diptych. Mere minutes perhaps, but a profound reality, excised from life like the vanished interstice between consecutive scenes in a moving picture. In its place, an impression: his towering mother coiled around him, the pink plump of her arms clamping so tight, desperately tight, her wet lips massaging his ear, and softly hissing her desperate remorse at having lost her foolish mind again and thrashing him savagely for boisterous play or coming late – panting – to the supper table. His brother didn’t attend that unseen train-side rite on account of a crushing and unprecedented ache in his forehead that kept him housebound. That memory, at least, was sharp: his junior in an oversized man’s cardigan seasoned with waxy camphor, insisting on shaking hands after a cursory and oddly jocular back-thumping hug. “Well. Exciting! The stories, eh!” He kept his bloodshot eyes lowered, fixed on the throat of the figure in front of him, then he turned with a theatrical, wincing grimace of pain and skipped to the stairs. Halfway up he spun, squinted, mimed the slow and deadly discharge of a rifle directly at his brothers face (“paah!”), cackled, then disappeared, pounding the treads with red stocking-ed heels flying. That same day on a heroic and tortured training ground the older boy and hundreds like him were snatched from childhood, he was told, and entered the arena of the gods. Pity and dignity be damned. “Boys no more! You are paladins, and men!” came the shrieks. “YOU are a striding Alexander. YOU, noble Blücher. And YOU, a new Achilles, king of Rome! All of you. Are. The. RISEN! PARSIFAL!” And by night the many iterations of the risen Parsifal, bitten by wild hunger and decimated by exhaustion, muttered and mashed their molars in their sleep or failed to sleep, quivering in that midway purgatory between blank oblivion and wakefulness, pained by images of warmth or home or childhood. Three months into his transformation he was given brief leave to descend from Mount Olympus and visit family before the final train journey into the Alps to deal hot death to the Italian race. (Damn them and their barbarities, decadence and rape!) Once home he demanded to take his brother and mother out for coffee and hot pastries. Shaven, pomaded and oddly thin in his fine uniform and coat, heads turned and for the first time in his life, largeness filled his ribcage but beneath it coiled something else. His mother laughed and laughed in the steamy clatter of the coffee house while out of sight she ground a ragged thumbnail into the lacquered grain of a table leg. The younger boy watched him intimately, mumbled repetitively and drew course, grating circles on his saucer with the tip of a knife, smearing broadly the mashed rubble of a pastry, batting eyelids pink and gummy. That evening they farewelled a second time and by day’s end he was prone, senseless and jammed into a narrow cot, his face toward the boots of a comrade-in-arms, one sole bound to the cracked leather with knotted twine. By the end of the month the air had become thin and around him on three sides high white peaks leered. Death would ride from the south-west, he thought. Sometime during the first month on the march under thrashing gales or resting in black ravines, when rations deteriorated despite the freeze and the sour reek of makeshift latrines carried to all corners of the camps, when queer toothaches bit at them and a formless horror loomed larger, a new company of men joined them, Becker among them. Becker, conscript like himself, sucked into an empire’s shame by decree and the absolute and flooding press of urgings and expectations of “bloody well doing what’s right!” Child-man of eighteen, pitifully short and thick-set, bespectacled, with a deeply pocked neck and burning stare. A small slim book locked in his hand at night: a shield. Attempt pleasantries with Becker after his first wordless days and a dam would burst as he whispered sharp, dangerous words about the age of machines, the New Man and great figures worthy of a greater pantheon: Mensheviks, radicals and Marx; or the proud dash of France’s Jacobins and other gallants. His words varied little: the sapped, toiling worker would bear the booted weight of the fat men that rode upon his back for only so long; secret undercurrents were moving; something very new and bright was rising. “There is a tempest ahead, a cleansing” he urged, “and pretty soon all this” – he would spread his arms then gaze from palm to palm with a frown as if startled by the brevity of his arm span – “will come to nothing. You mark me! Yes!” Then he would collapse into a filthy bedroll or slump into a squat against the lea of a boulder and direct his lamp-lit face to the secret of his book, breathily picking at the sodden leaves with energy as if an item of value was hidden there. His listeners burned inwardly. No, never that! Theirs was a race and a realm clayed by Time itself, eternal, fixed in form by God above and fed with the milk of Mother Soil below. Each dawn under iron skies, helmeted older men in thick, downy greatcoats, now like crushed and matted felt, progressed through the lines. One of them, a tall officer with clean hands, his helmet burnished and glaring, made his way daily through the rocks, ice or mire, lifting and lowering boots with care to avoid sucking filth or oil-scummed pools of sleet and piss left by youngsters too cold or too cowed by bullying lance-corporals to stray from their posts. Slowing to view the men in their unshaven bands – some bare-headed, hair slicked into spiked black tufts by weeks’ worth of oily grime, their shoulders high and shuddering, fists rammed deep into pockets – his gaze flickered over them. The crab claw of his mutton chops was now a matted forest. Black chimpanzee fuzz covered the backs of clasped white fingers. On one of his passes a foot slipped on a slimed rock, soiling one boot and spattering his coat hem with pricks of black specks. His cheekbones purpled as he sucked furiously through clamped teeth, tutting over and over, bending to brush at the hem with the back of his hand, as the silvered bowl of his bobbing helmet flared back the men’s grey likenesses: bodies misshapen, drawn, stretched like rubber. Then he passed on, unremembered, the men reverting to their thoughtless rituals and the vice-like freeze with fumbling fingers, faces numb, breath expelled in shapeless jolting puffs, rising like smoke, lost in the white. By night the men complained of hunger and the colossal heft of their equipment and packs. Pettiness and quarrels thrived in the dark and to many, the person of Becker, now half the man he had been, was like venom splintering into them. It made them sick, sick to their guts to hear fondest beliefs impugned: that their great statesman king – mighty, a Hohenzollern! – was a pampered ogre masquerading as a gentleman; the filial labourers of the state were sightless fools, instruments of conniving industrialists. For weeks arguments and curses were whispered in the blackness. One night the orator, discoursing with a mitten-ed palm against an overhanging rock, worked a red-haired seventeen-year-old into an unvoiced rage, causing him to land with a sharp crack! a flat-handed swipe on Becker's pink face, freeing spectacles and the foul red tunic that turban-ed the speakers head. Steel arcs through the murk. Airborne lenses flash back red lamplight. Glass bursts on stone. Silence. Becker held his assailant’s mad gaze, right palm clapped to left cheek, his pupils cavernous, black shotgun barrels in the gloom. As he stood his loosed tunic slid, slowly, down the back of his head, and flopped to the floor. Then he moved softly to scrape scattered lens chips and wire frames from the earth. The following morning, a one-eyed Becker found his precious book had gone. Day by day on the march, the men’s ailments worsened. They suffered the sick judder of palsied limbs – something strange and beyond the cold. Reaching hands flickered, toppling opened water flasks, upsetting cartridge cases, stacked cans of meat. Shared, hot cigarettes were dropped during huddled handovers but swiftly retrieved. And once, the tragedy of a shattered brandy bottle, its rare gold cargo slinking into cracks in rocks, caused days of shocked resentment. Jarring cramps gripped them, fierce things lashed inside them. What the devil was wrong with the rations? The quartermasters should be shot, some insisted while the calmer men just smiled. After a long descent they reached a broad green valley where their journey ended. A black river lay in the distance. Here, thinking of family one star-bright night, his face to the sky, he drowsed and dreamed he was running quick and free, dashing through curtains of wind as he fled over fields at impossible speeds. Or was it the fields and the green wild of the world that spun beneath as he raced on the spot? He sees his brother’s face pressed close to his, talking so, so quickly, soundlessly. Something is squeezed in his brothers right hand, he is moving it in tight, jagged circles, making it whine, grate, whine. His brother, lashed bright white under the blaze of a lightning flash, is climbing an endless faraway staircase, scarlet heels flying. His brother is laughing in the iced wind in front of the station. His mother is there, chin raised and talking without a sound, straining to tell her children a secret so very important, desperately important, as a staccato DUNK, DUNK is rising from somewhere unseen. Now it is utterly dark. Nothing. Now he is awake, the daylight is white, his belly is full. Feeling, sensation, they come from outside of him now. He is a colossus peering down, vast-eyed, on shredded puttees and giant black boots standing in freezing brown water far, far beneath him. An ocean crowded with ice floes. Whose are they, the boots and the puttees? He’s longing to know. And how many hues can he see in the slick of the rainbow prism-ed on that sea's filmy face? Now he is watching the great, bright mountains – shouldering the high air – in all their golden glory that sigh to him and to the plane of the blue, blue sky beyond. Figures beside him are calling, he ignores them and now the vast of the blue is gone and that precious pearl, the sun, is falling, such a rare sun-fall with feelings and colours he longs to hold on to, naming them: glory red and sweet, elegant yellows like those tall thin flowers in the windows of shops on the square; and mellowing orange like, like what? And something like peach colours, something like peach in the cloudbanks that cover one half of the heavens they are long and ever so flat the galloping cloudbanks grown tufted and mauve at one end he sees coal-black birds pounding coal black wings slapping the air crisp and sharp in a sky that looks painted each plume of those reaching wings textured and soft and true is that one a crow crow making all of those noises like talking but maybe they’re rooks those birds and how can you tell a crow from a rook? A rook from a rook? Tell me. It is close to the end now. He’s deep underground and knows the sharp, pinching stench of soil, oil, steel and hot sweat. He hears the leaping ox heart in his breast. He feels the blooming warmth between his legs. He’s standing and waiting for something, something. The darkness is deep when all of a sudden the singular words of his school master, crippled from birth, call to him echoing out as they did in that chamber of regimented lore one iron-skied day while crisped black leaves swept to the earth like ashes and pigeons out-throated their tumbling gurgles from high in a clock tower choked with ivy. “This continent’s changing, the whole world is changing, and ours is never, a nation, to suffer fools gladly. Over the centuries, the tall, clean-limbed German has fortified, stoutly, that proud house that always was ours, and forty years ago, apotheosis was forged, in the fires. Transfiguration!” Coming closer, treading noiselessly among the desks, swaying, laying long fingers with bulbous knuckles now on one boy’s jacket-ed forearm – a caress – now on another’s, he whispers tenderly, like a hiss, “Blood, is not something to fear. No. Not by us. And this sanctified nation will one day, soon, be a precious trust, in your hands, my boys, remember that. Remember.” Now strange lyrics return to him too. Rhythmic and distant but fierce, traces from earlier ages perhaps, fragments of verse? Wasn’t it Schiller? Then they fly to him, line on flaming line in a hot-blooded gush that uplifts him and renders him heady in the high pride of being and full, joyful belonging: The close of all life is a beechen trap Whose massy postern hinges wrought are gapp’d, Wherethro’ is spied all that is rich and great. Ours is the keeper of the keys that fust Inert, and current is the foundry blaze of greatness and our race.