Shortly after their conversation in the diner both Spinoza and Tannehill were drafted. Spinoza's college education placed him in a staff position for a battalion commander in the army and he shipped out immediately. Tannehill was assigned to the infantry and followed Spinoza a few months later.
Both had similar experiences on the way over. After a stultifying 3000-mile railway trip from coast-to-coast, they were stuffed in the bowels of cargo liners in New York and shipped across the North Atlantic.
Every knock or creak in the night as they swung precariously in their hammocks below deck signaled imminent danger from a u-boat's torpedo or another angry iceberg intent on making a name for itself after its sibling wrecked RMS Titanic a few years prior.
Spinoza, who grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan with easy access to sailing equipment, was able to adjust to the sawblade movement of the ocean even when he was stuffed below the waterline with no access to an outside view.
Tannehill, who grew up near the stockyards with easy access to cattle and swine, had a tougher time. Originally assigned a top hammock, his bunkmates shortly grew frustrated with his un-seaworthy stomach and the consequences that his bottom bunkmate faced as a result. Subsequently, he was often relegated to sleeping on the floor. He spent his first few nights in his new quarters avoiding the sloshing detritus from other soldiers who hadn't found their sea legs either but quickly succumbed to exhaustion and simply took every opportunity he could to shower, regardless of water temperature to remove the day's vomit.
After a brief stint docking in Liverpool, Spinoza was ushered across Britain and landed in France in March 1918. As a member of the battalion staff, he was stashed safely behind the front and was rarely exposed to the Triple Entente's trenches. The horrors of No Man's Land were a distant threat to him.
However, he was not assured of escaping from the horrors that funneled back from the front and No Man's Land. The battalion staff tent abutted the evacuation route back to the medical facilities. During his first month, as weary medics deposited their cargo next to the tent for a brief respite, Spinoza honed the rudimentary French he picked up in school to soothe and entertain the wounded troops even if it was only for their final few moments of existence. He used his natural talents for mimicry to keep the British and American troops morale up by imitating their regional accents.
But, after the first month, the stream of wounded and dead proved too overwhelming to sustain his self-imposed humanitarian mission and he concentrated on the mundane tasks at hand to drown out the moaning and screaming around him. What seemed like a relatively safe two-mile buffer from the trenches soon became a time-delayed harbinger of dread as the swirling planes and distant staccato booms indicated a fresh delivery of medical monstrosities would be passing by shortly.
By the end of the summer, Spinoza was beginning to worry that his enforced apathy was draining the humanity out of him. To counteract this void in his soul, during lulls in his work, he'd chat with the wounded as he did before.
In September he encountered a soldier who, despite his literary background and broad vocabulary, Spinoza could only describe - optimistically - as a quarter of a human being. The man, knowing that he had at most an hour or two left before dying, asked Spinoza for a cigarette as a small mercy. Spinoza obliged and lit a cigarette for the soldier. The new flora of the Continent had caused his hay fever to reach its peak, though, and he didn't pick up on the faint odor of gasoline emanating from the soldier's clothes.
As Spinoza walked back toward the tent, content that he could give a dying man some succor however small, the soldier burst into flames, writhing in even more pain than he'd been in moments before. Spinoza rushed back, panicking and searching for some method to smother the flames.
A nearby officer spotted his anguish, walked over, unholstered his sidearm and shot the dying man in the head. He reholstered his weapon and silently placed a hand on Spinoza's shoulder before walking away.
Spinoza sobbed for an hour at his desk afterward and then returned to charting maps for the battalion. He didn't speak to another wounded soldier until Armistice Day.
Once Armistice Day arrived, Spinoza prepared to head back to the States with the other soldiers and to put his time in the tent behind him. A day before he was due to embark he received a telegram. Its brevity briefly made him gape in disbelief, but a reconfirmation of the source - a close family friend - unmasked the shock of his original reading:
ALL SIBLINGS DEAD OF INFLUENZA.
FATHER SUFFERED HEART ATTACK IN GRIEF. DEAD.
MOTHER INCONSOLABLE BUT ALIVE.
Upon receiving this news, Spinoza decided to alter his plans and responded with a telegram of his own to his mother:
COME TO NICE. ITS NICE.
WILL BE IN FRANCE INDEFINITELY.
A month later she met him in Nice. They stayed for a year enjoying the creamy combination of cheese and eggs in Niçoise toasts before moving north to Paris. They both remained in Paris until 1921 as two members of two lost generations until his mother passed away from a chronic broken heart. Spinoza remained in France for another two years before heading back to Capital City and resuming his career as a crime beat reporter covering the Shining City That Shows Prohibition Works.
[Author's Note: Today's edition is 940 words for a total of 16397. I had to do some research on American troop arrival dates in WWI. Unlike WWII, where American engagement lasted for years, total time in Europe during the First World War was only about a year and combat didn't really start until about six months before the end of the war.]
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