its Edwardian once-splendor.George breathed out quickly. He did not know what he now expected to happen. The voices had not gone - in fact, they rose to new levels of intensity and anger, almost as if an unseen crowd milled around his head.With a sudden and obstinate fury that surprised even him, George got out of the car, slammed the door, and began striding toward the building across the deserted wasteland. Pausing briefly as the building loomed above him, he stepped inside through the doorless frame and looked around. And old kiosk stood forlornly in the corner, its glass long since smashed and vandalized. The rest of the dingy room was in a similar state of disrepair, covered in graffiti and littered with empty beer cans and tin foil-covered plastic bottles that were the signs of recently vacated teenagers. On one such expletive-strewn wall, an ancient peeling poster declared the departure times of long mothballed ferries.Suddenly, George remembered.Deep in the recesses of his ancient mind, a memory surfaced and gradually faded into vision. This same room, cleared of its rubbish, freshly painted, and filled with the faces of smiling soldiers, laughing and joking, ready to join the fight. A vision of a happy, optimistic time, of young men in search of their own slice of glory. The Eye before the Storm.And then a second memory surfaced, buried even deeper than the first.Darkness, broken only by the occasional ghostly twilight of a flare, which lit the decimated lunar landscape of the battlefield. Broken, shattered buildings, trees lying at obscene angles, and the sound of a machine gun barking its deadly warning. The distant boom of the guns that shook the hastily constructed trench with their very roar. And, most vivid of all, the thick, cloying, stinking mud that clutched at his boots with every step, as though the countless corpses contained in it clamored for the living above to join them.A little way down the trench,...
