Summary

Cyril Bagger, a private with Company P, snaps awake in the mud after a shell lands close enough that he is sure it has finally killed him. He is assigned to burial duty behind the line in the Bois de Fays, but the ground is a churned landscape of craters and half-covered bodies that makes rear positions feel only marginally safer than the trenches. In the instant between consciousness and panic, he imagines he is back in a warm, perfumed room with Marie-Louise, the prostitute he paid to make the war feel far away, before a voice yanks him back into the wreckage.

Around him, Company P moves as if the battle has not ended, hauling boards and corpses through tongues of displaced mud. The men keep pausing to listen for the sound that has been tormenting them: a relentless shriek rising from somewhere...