The Lost Soldier

T he rain has come again to this small, forgotten corner of France. It falls with the same stubborn insistence it had then, turning the lane outside my cottage into a river of mud.

To them, I am the old soldier, the quiet eccentric with the wooden leg who lives on a meager pension and the ghosts of the past. They whisper that the Great War broke my mind as surely as it took my foot. Let them. They cannot possibly comprehend the truth of it. They see a madman; I see a man who has looked through a crack in time and can never fully look away.

It began in the mud, of course. Everything in that war began and ended in the mud.

They amputated my foot on November 4th, 1914, and with the grinding sound of iron on bone, they severed me from the war. But they also anchored me to something else. Something far stranger.