Hero by Paul Butler

sleeplessness.
    These physical changes, I realized, meant nothing. The man with the black wavy hair, the grudging smile, and the soft manner would look different now. The army would have made him sturdier and wiry, perhaps even gaunt, given recent reports of dysentery among the regiments. My fleeting vision of his profile tends to confirm this.
    But when I tried to impose the old smile upon that spare and wiry soldier, when I tried to imagine this older, leaner Simon teasing me about the frizzy red hair of mine, which wouldn’t lie straight under a band, I realized two incompatible worlds were colliding, that the new Simon and the Simon of my memory could not mix.
    In his letters I glimpsed a depth of slow change. It was like watching a well gradually drying after its spring deviated to another place. There was joviality during training and when he first reached the front. The rough and tumble of young men echoed on the pages—joking between officers, ribbing of the men, a palpable sense of excitement that enraptured even me. Even in the dank underground quarters that became his home, there was still life and vitality. He was so witty about the rats and the mud I felt he had to be exaggerating to entertain me. If he were not, I thought, then how marvellous to be a man, how marvellous not to worry about such things when there is work to do.
    But the months wore on and his tone altered. There were fewer details, fewer words of any kind. A forced quality crept into the humour; he crammed jokes into mirthless situations. He talked of the constant noise, and then he talked of the unnatural quiet, how quiet itself became noise. Finally, there was that one last plea, made desperate because only I understood his pride well enough to know that it was a plea. It was a standard letter, saying little, attempting few pleasantries, then those two words after his usual signature: write soon . This was the day before the battle.
    I had many sleepless nights about Simon after the news came in, and many strange dreams when his letter followed. It haunted me that these two words should be the last he had written to me before his own injury and Charles’s death. I had a recurring vision of him standing on the cliff edge, near the old graveyard. He was in his officer’s uniform, ribbons and medals on his chest, and in his hand he held a bone the size of a Sunday joint of lamb but thinner. A human bone, perhaps. Although there was no sound, his lips were moving, and I could tell that the circling wind that tugged at his ribbons stole also his words as he spoke them. I rode like a spirit upon that same breeze and with each revolution willed myself a little closer to him so that I might catch his message. Although he spoke continuously, each time I passed his lips I could make out one phrase only: write soon . The faint request loosened shells from the bank, and scattered them on the beach below. Write soon , I caught again as the breeze scooped me suddenly into the sky.
    And now, as my ears catch the dull opening and closing of car doors in the distance, I can sense that the dream was real after all, that my reply came too late for him. Now I am no more substantial to him than the wind.
    My hand reaches towards the window. As my flesh meets the glass, a fog appears in halo around each fingertip. I think of Major Pickard’s letter, of that brightly flickering hope that it gave me: even through the direst horrors, the sweetest kernel remained unharmed. Somehow the gentlest part of Simon’s humanity had been not only protected, but enhanced, by the hardships and dangers. It made so little sense, this belief, but was magical simply because it was against logic. Like the calves and oxen kneeling at the stable, such impossibilities demand belief because they promise to transcend all losses, to act as balm for human pain.
    Despite all that he has been through, I told myself, despite the suffering, the pain, and the degradation,