The Ridge

They talked through the second watch, or rather the General talked and Chen wrote down what he was told, because it seemed the only useful thing to do in a tent with a headless man. The head on the desk watched him while he wrote, and it was strange to take dictation from a pair of eyes that did not blink.

On the ridge, the General said, the enemy held the high ground. We asked for guns and were told the guns would come tomorrow. Tomorrow is a country no soldier has ever visited, and we did not care to march there without him. So we charged on foot, with the cold ground under us.

The first charge failed, he said. The second failed. The third held, which is the only kind of holding that matters. I was among the first over the parapet. That is the last thing I remember, before the world went dark from the bottom up, like water coming in under a door.

When I woke, he said, I was standing. I thought the dark was a hood slipped over my head. I reached up to pull it off and found there was nothing to pull at all. And then I looked down at my hands, and they were still holding the map, and I thought: well, there is still the report.

Chen wrote it all down in a neat hand. He had never believed in the supernatural. He did not, he found, have to. The General was simply a man who had decided that a document was worth more than a neck. The absurdity of it was what made it unbearable, and the practicality of it was what kept him sitting on his stool.

Tell me plainly, the General said. How do I look?

Sir, Chen said. He licked his lips, and the lips felt like paper. You look, with respect, as though your head is on the desk.

Yes, the General said, as though this confirmed something he had suspected. And yet the report is nearly done. Tell me, courier, when a man dies quietly in his bed at eighty, surrounded by weeping children, do people say he finished well? Or do they only say he finished, which is not the same thing at all?

Chen did not answer. The lamp had burned low and its shadow leaned across the page. He added up the columns as he had been taught, and the numbers came out even, which he took to mean that the General's arithmetic, at least, was the arithmetic of a living man and not a thing the dark had left behind.

It is not glory, the General said. I have had glory, and it is mostly a headache and a long speech by a man who did not charge. It is only that the work was given to me, and I happened to be here to do it. A man is not permitted to be late to his own work merely because the war was late in killing him. That would be the one discourtesy no soldier, alive or otherwise, can allow himself.

Chen wrote that down too, because he had begun to understand that the General meant every word he spoke. Outside the tent the camp slept on, and the stars came out one by one above the ridge that had cost so many of them their lives.