With a stormfront advancing, he countermanded orders and called a halt to the attack. Artillery preparations fell fruitless, forlorn as unheeded thunder.

The storm gathered black and thick. The men returned to their dugouts. Soon the general was at the command post, anger mighty as a bombardment.

“Colonel, such insubordination calls for the ultimate penalty - court martial and death.”
“General, there’s no way to assault in this storm. You see already how the ground becomes a quagmire. We could never have reached our objectives.”
“You think this a matter of objectives? What a naïve child you are, colonel.”

The general lit a cigar.

“Your work here is to die in the mud. Your objective, to curb all the increase.”

She went to where they’d told her, where her lover had been consumed in the great spring offensive along with the million others.

She was surprised to find that the ground was barren and cracked with drought. They’d told her that her lover, all the boys and men, had died in a quagmire choked in mud. Of course now it was summer, and all those men had died in spring to curb increase. Maybe it worked.

She found his ghost waiting, as she imagined she would, waiting among all the others in their different uniforms. Different helmets and different boots. A mass, a horde of dead.

Now she had to pick him out and explain that they could never marry.

Through the crowd threading, following the well-heeled man through the streets. She watches his swaggering military gait, burns with rage. But no time – cross the street, slip into the street door as it closes behind him.

He pauses, looks round, seeing just a harmless girl. He raises his hat sardonically, and goes upstairs to his bachelor flat.

Again she slips in, this time with pistol drawn. Motions for quiet, gestures for him to take a seat in the rich leather armchair by the fireplace. Takes the chair opposite, pistol trained on his face. Handlebar moustache, ruddy countenance, stiff ginger hair.

“What’s the story, miss?”
“The same old story. My love was once among the living, now he is gone among the dead to curb the increase. I barely know him and he barely knows me anymore.”
“We did what we had to do...”
“To curb the increase, diminish the crowd. Yes, he told me that. My dead lover told me.”

=== A CROWD / END ===

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