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AROUNDERHOUSE Joint

<BEGIN LOG>

[Dr. Harold Blank enters the room, escorted by Sergeant Major Bennett. Both are wearing surgical masks, and seat themselves by the bed.]

Blank: Hello, Mr. McCandel.

Bennett: Major McCandel.

[SCP-8918-A sits up in bed, scrabbling for his eyeglasses. Once he puts them on, he appraises Dr. Blank.]

SCP-8918-A: Hmph. Afternoon.

Blank: My name's Dr. Harry Blank. I'm from the Foundation His—

SCP-8918-A: I know who you are, boy. Know you're not from the Mounties, with that hair.

Blank: Excuse you.

Bennett: Major McCandel was briefed beforehand. Some ground rules: you may not make inquiries regarding or subject to classified information or operations—

Blank: How am I supposed to know they're classified if I don't ask?

Bennett: I'll let you know. This interview is at the Major's leisure; he may end it at any time. Visiting hours end at nineteen-hundred on the dot, so you have until then.

Blank: And I take it you're going to go get coffee or something and not hover over my shoulder like a gargoyle.

Bennett: No.

Blank: Damn. Worth a try!

[He turns to SCP-8918-A.]

Blank: Well, no point in wasting time. Mr. McCandel—

SCP-8918-A:Major McCandel.

[Dr. Blank purses his lips.]

Blank: Alright. Major McCandel — you were active in the Canadian Expeditionary Force from 1914 to 1918 as part of the 78th Battalion, C Company, correct?

SCP-8918-A: Aye.

Blank: You fought across the Western Front with members of your Squadron B, colloquially known as the Fab Five, of which you were the leader.

SCP-8918-A: As much a leader as was present.

Blank: You were recalled back to Canada after the Treaty of Versailles, and were not mobilized for World War II.

SCP-8918-A: Mmph.

[A moment of silence. Blank claps his hands and rises to his feet.]

Blank: Well, I guess that's that. History done!

Bennett: What are you talking about?

Blank: What areyou talking about? You asked me to compile a history, I compiled a history. Thanks for your service and all, Major, but you were five guys out of a few million.

Bennett: The only anomalous unit in the Canadian Army. I think you can do a little better than an Encyclopedia Britannia summary.

Blank: Where did you get your doctorate in history again?

SCP-8918-A: I lied.

[Both turn to him.]

Blank: Pardon?

SCP-8918-A: I wasn't the leader. I was the squadron's commanding officer, obviously. But Drew was the leader, really. Of the five of us, he was the only one who'd seen any real action before. He was in Africa, you know? With the Boers.

[Dr. Blank exchanges a look with Sgt. Mjr. Bennett. He takes his seat again, opening his notepad.]

Blank: That would be… SCP-8918-B? Andrew Leem. Voyageur.

SCP-8918-A: Aye. He always told us he had a grandfather at Waterloo under Nelson, though of course I have no idea how much truth there is to that, if any. But the rest of us were in a mood, and so we listened to his stories of fighting the Boers at Spion Kop, felling a hundred colonials with one volley of fire. A rifle regiment in full formation, gleaming guns and bright peacoats. We were all in a mood, you see, because the Department of the Militia had bungled the planning, and we were to miss the first big push.

Blank: You're talking about Flanders.

SCP-8918-A: Aye. That was what we were hearing, that it would all be said and done by Christmas, and so the five of us were of the mind that missing Flanders was missing the whole war. Not the case, of course, but we were kids, really. Drew was the oldest, and tided us over telling us how we'd get our chance for glory. Between the five of us, we rationalized, we could take out a rifle company easily. The Germans would see the five children they were facing, tuck their tails between their legs all the way back to Berlin. Medals, girls, and back home in time for supper.

Blank: How well did you know each other before the war?

SCP-8918-A: Not at all. I'd heard tell, and I imagine the others much the same about me. I was just a local, helping out where I could. Halting bank stick-ups, stopping out-of-control locomotives. The Calgary Cavalier. I'd heard there were others like me. Never really cared to look. Then we started getting telegrams about the brouhaha in Europe and I volunteered, obviously. Something real to fight for. I was walking by a paperstand when I saw the headline — "KAISER DECLARES WAR" — and went straight to the recruitment office. The line wrapped around the building, and the sergeant told me to go to the back, until I lifted the building straight off the ground. That got their attention.

Blank: King Arthur would be impressed.

SCP-8918-A: What?

Blank: …King Arthur's ghost. He rescued you from the brink of death. gave you your armor and your sword and your powers. Tasked you to be the protector of all Canada. Not ringing any bells?

[SCP-8918-A laughs wheezily.]

SCP-8918-A: That was the line they told me to parrot. No King Arthur's ghost, boy. I was tilling my father's wheat field when I fell over a box half-sticking out the ground. A coffin. Pried it open and there was a skeleton in full plate inside, hands wrapped around a shield painted with the Virgin Mary. My fingers touched our Lady's face, and I've been like this since.

Blank: Huh. I always wondered why King Arthur would appear in rural Canada.

SCP-8918-A: It was a shit story. The others had just as shit ones. But they got the job done.

Blank: What was the job?

SCP-8918-A: Morale, boy. Not that we were much needed at the start. Camp was more like a harvest festival than a military waystation. Spirits ran high. We had no damn idea what was going on at Marne, at Ypres. We drank and laughed. Training rudimentary and decades out of date. We were still learning to march in damn rifle formation! The other men looked at us like we were going to plant our foots up the Kaiser's rump personally. I think we thought we would all the way to Ypres.

<END EXCERPT>

<BEGIN EXCERPT>

[Dr. Blank writes in his notepad idly as SCP-8918-A speaks. Sgt. Mjr. Bennett stands by the door.]

SCP-8918-A: Oh, it flew alright. The thing flew like you.

Blank: I can't fly.

SCP-8918-A: Nothing gets by you, does it? She flew perfectly fine at home. Europe was a different matter entirely. Maybe the air was unfamiliar, maybe she didn't want to be there — which makes her smarter than any of us. But in any case, she bucked and kicked and Drew only barely kept her under control while the rest of us held on for dear life over Belgium.

Bennett: The Second Battle of Ypres.

SCP-8918-A: Aye. We were dispatched as scouts. Smith-Dorrien figured having us sail through the skies and see exactly where the Germans were marshalling would be a perfect boost for morale. No real danger. The Germans were pushing, you see. Marne had ruined their plans for a quick war. Ypres sat at the mouth of the Yser, and the Flemish Coast provided a perfect staging ground for anyone seeking to—

[Dr. Blank makes a noise.]

SCP-8918-A: Hmph?

Blank: With as little offense as possible, can we get to the important bits?

SCP-8918-A: Theimportant bits?

Blank: Okay, that came out wrong.

SCP-8918-A: Damn right it did.

Blank: Look. I'm not a military historian. That's not what I do. I don't care about it. I don't care about long lists of dates and battles and maps of manuevers and pushes and which general was at which offensive. It makes my eyes glaze over. I warned you before we started.

Bennett: And that makes it a less important field? Because it bores you?

Blank: No, it's a less important field because military historians write their dissertations with one hand. It's all sitting around and number-crunching on death and butchery and murder without making any kind of salient point on how it happened or why it was bad.

[SCP-8918-A coughs.]

SCP-8918-A: Alright. Quit your whining and I'll tell you a story.

Blank: What kind of story?

SCP-8918-A: Do you know where my shield is?

Blank: The Museum of History, in Quebec. I saw it when I was a kid.

SCP-8918-A: Did you notice my armor wasn't with it?

Blank: I'm intrigued.

[SCP-8918-A falls into a wet coughing fit for several seconds before recovering.]

SCP-8918-A: We'd landed in Marseille, marching towards Belgium on the dirt roads. Full uniform, freshly-starched coats and gleaming spats and shined boots. Hinterlander and I were allowed to be out of uniform, of course — we made a ridiculous image, me in my armor and him in his furs talking to the officers' mounts. Spirits were barely dimmed by the never-ending train of white-covered wagons passing us on the other side of the road, heading back the way we came. We made camp a few miles from the front and were told by the General to take Drew's canoe and scout out the formations. So the five of us piled into this creaky canoe and began paddling, taking to the sky.

[He is silent for a moment.]

SCP-8918-A: France and Belgium are beautiful from the sky. All rolling green hills and pastures, sheepland. I remember that, even in the dark. Moon overhead, us leaning over the sides and trying to make out anything from the shadows.

[He pauses again, and continues.]

SCP-8918-A: Drew was so busy trying to contain the canoe's weaving he didn't consider what she might be weavingfrom. All of a sudden we were topsy-turvy, and holding on for dear life became literal. Everything was spinning around so fast I vomited inside my helm. I could smell smoke, and we were falling, in a graceless dive, crashing back down to Earth. I imagine I fainted at some point, or suffocated on my own sick.

Blank: Jesus. What happened?

SCP-8918-A: A stray mortar. To this day, I have no idea if the Germans were actually aiming at us or not. It was pure confusion. I awoke to Drew screaming in my ear and dull thumping.

[He barks a laugh.]

SCP-8918-A: I pushed him away. I told him I didn't want to march. I had no idea where I was.

Blank: What did he do?

SCP-8918-A: He yanked my helm off. All of a sudden the dull thumping was a sharp booming and there was smoke and something coppery in my nose. I was facedown in the mud. I tried to get up and he screamed something I couldn't hear over the steady booming. When I didn't listen to whatever he said, he pulled my leg out from underneath me and sent me crashing to the dirt again. I was going to sock him in the face until I heard theTH-TH-TH-TH-TH-TH cut through the air where I'd been a moment ago. Machine gun fire. My greaves became warm and I realized I'd soiled myself.

Blank: You crashed in no man's land.

SCP-8918-A: Aye. Drew crawled on his belly towards me and touched my head. Showed me the blood. Screamed to follow him and I started crawling after him blindly. For the better part of an hour, all I could see were the soles of his boots, wiggling side to side as we plastered ourselves as close to the mud as possible and crawled. We'd change heading from time to time and I wouldn't understand why until I came to the corpse and scooted around it. I couldn't tell which side most of them were on.

[Pause.]

SCP-8918-A: I'd been hit quite badly in the head, though of course I didn't realize it at the time. I didn't understand much of anything going on. It was all a bit hazy. I just kept my mind on about Drew's stories about standing in rifle formation, kneeling, and firing. And then at some point I realized I'd stopped moving. Some part of my armor — the greaves were caught in those loops of barbed wire that laid across the field. I was stuck fast. Tried to pull myself free, to no avail. Couldn't extricate it without rising, and couldn't rise without being turned into ribbons by the German guns. And I think some part of my mind realized, then, that I might die there, far from home. That I'd never taste my mother's pot roast again, or feel the calluses on my father's hands again when he embraced me, or hear the donkeys braying when the snow began to thaw and drip through the patchy straw roof of our stables. It had been winter when we'd left Halifax and all of them would be seeing the spring thaw now. And I was to bleed to death in a mudfield in Belgium. And I began to weep quite earnestly, then.

[Silence.]

SCP-8918-A: Eventually one of us noticed I was not with them. And Drew came back. He was not gentle — there was really no time to be gentle. He roughly grabbed my collar and pulled me forward with enough force to snap the piece of armor off my body. Dragged me for a dozen meters until something in me righted itself and my arms began to move again, pulling me forward. And we crawled like that until I reached Hinterlander and we all began to move as one body again, Drew's fingers wrapped around my collar, Hinterlander's hand grasping Nelson, until we reached the lights of the British line and fell over the top into the trench. I must've made a fine sight — a knight, sobbing, covered in mud and my own piss, half my greaves missing. We were all sobbing, I noticed. We were just boys, really.

[Silence.]

<END EXCERPT>

<BEGIN EXCERPT>

[Dr. Blank has his notepad closed, tapping it against his knee idly.]

Blank: And he really never spoke?

SCP-8918-A: Six years I spent alongside the man. We fought, ate, shit together. Only ever heard him speak once.

Blank: What did he say?

SCP-8918-A: It's not important.

Blank: What do you mean it's not important? He's the Hinterlander! No tongue of man and all that. Hedoesn't speak. It's his whole deal.

SCP-8918-A: That was never truly accurate. He spoke quite a lot — just not to other people.

Blank: Hold on. That stuff was real? He could talk to animals?

SCP-8918-A: Aye.

Blank: Huh.

SCP-8918-A: Though admittedly I've no idea how much of that was him talking as opposed to him listening. He was a fine listener. In any case, it came in awfully handy too many times to count.

[He begins to laugh, interrupted by a coughing fit.]

SCP-8918-A: Once, we cut off an Austrian artillery brigade at Verdun from reinforcements. A squirrel came up to him. Seven feet tall, all muscle, draped in skinned animals — even the other soldiers were afraid of him, and this little brown squirrel wandered up to him. Asking for a nut, I guess. He reached into one of those hide pouches, silent as can be, pulled out a walnut, handed it to the creature. In return, it told us exactly where an Austrian relief force was moving through the forest with much-needed artillery shells. That was a good, clean victory.

Blank: But you said he spoke to you once. In English?

SCP-8918-A: Aye.

Blank: Feels like the kind of thing that should go in a history to me.

[SCP-8918-A thinks for a moment.]

SCP-8918-A: Late 1916. We were at the Somme.

[Dr. Blank and Sgt. Mjr. Bennett both look up.]

Bennett: TheSomme?

Blank: I thought you were a morale unit.

SCP-8918-A: That fantasy ended at Ypres. We spent a week huddling in the trenches, knee-deep in mud and rain and sleet, shoulder to shoulder with the British and the French. Ducking at the sound of German cannon fire, manning the machine gun when the gunner collapsed from exhaustion. I abandoned parts of my armor; it turns out armor enchanted to shatter the enemy's blade is of little use when you never even see your foe. Took to wearing a hodgepodge of plate and uniform. Kept my shield, though. Anyway, the command clung to it, of course — sending us on victory parades in captured towns, on the rare occasion there remained anything to parade through. But Ypres taught us a valuable lesson.

Blank: What's that?

SCP-8918-A: The command is worse than useless. They will blindly send you into artillery fire or an ambush or some other death trap. They'll throw you to the dogs a thousand times over to claw a square inch of ground. The only ones you can rely on are the men next to you in the trench. We weren't going to abandon them. So when the battalion was ordered to march to the Somme for the third offensive, we followed.

[Pause.]

SCP-8918-A: If Ypres was death, the Somme was Hell. In Ypres, at least, you knew where the enemy was. You knew to huddle inside the trench, behind the wire. And you knew when the cannonfire began, to press yourself to the ground and pray.

Blank: But not the Somme.

SCP-8918-A: No.

[Silence.]

SCP-8918-A: The cannonfire never really began at the Somme, because it never really ended. There was no moment in which you could not feel your bones shaking, whether from our own guns or the Germans returning fire. For two months we stayed there, learning to live around, live with these monstrous pieces of artillery. They stood, they fought, they jammed but never broke. And they survived, so to survive, I became like them. Hiding in the — to call it a trench would be a gross understatement. Ypres had a trench, with wood-slat fortifications and structure. There were kerosene lamps and signal wires. This was a hole in the ground filled with men. The wooden posts had long since rotted away in the watery standstill that had accumulated. The walls were more packed dirt than anything, and every time it rained, a little more would give away, joining the ankle-deep muddy water.

[His leg twitches.]

SCP-8918-A: I was glad I kept my sabatons. Too many others weren't so lucky. Kicking Horse, he caught a nasty bout of trench foot. The skin on the soles of his feet grew white, began to slough off. He couldn't run until he recovered, which meant he was more or less useless. When we first joined the forces, it was in the middle of a minor German push. Everyone was kneeling, packed like sardines, grunting and groaning under the deafening guns. A French corporal next to me was sucking down some moldy crumbs of bread as though it were a delicacy. I told him he should watch out for rats. He smiled and said something in French. I didn't speak French, and so I thought he was thanking me until Drew passed by and I relayed it to him.

Blank: What did he say?

[SCP-8918-A smiles.]

SCP-8918-A: "Even the rats do not come down here." Sums up the conditions nicely, I think. There were animals, though. Dogs. Cockroaches. The officers had to have their horses, of course, safely behind the line and out of danger. Animals of pure ego. These were officers who had been raised on stories of their fathers in Crimea, you see, and felt that an officer without his horse was no officer at all. The Hinterlander spent days in the stables, caring for them. Whether all that nonsense about being raised in the wild was true or not, he had a remarkable way with horses. He would sit, brush them, they would talk, and he would listen. Then come back, motion for a map, and mark down the path of a German patrol.

Blank: How would a horse know that?

SCP-8918-A: I suspect the horses had little regard for our war, and were more than happy to chat with their German brethren. He never told us. But he loved those horses, easily more than their officers did. They were probably smarter than them.

Blank: How's that?

SCP-8918-A: I had assumed our role would be to squat in the mud and wait for an opening. Maybe rely on the tanks the British commanders kept talking about with the tone one typically reserves for Christ. No. We were there, one night, shells streaking across the sky, and suddenly there was a great commotion and all the British and Canadians were stirring, waking ourselves up, checking our Enfields. I asked one what was going on, and he shouted we were going over.

[He laughed.]

SCP-8918-A: "Going over where?" I asked in confusion. He looked at me like I was an invalid, but graced me with a reply. "Are you daft? Over the top." I couldn't believe it. The guns were still firing — and as long as the Germans were firing, we were firing back. We were being sent out with our backs to our own machine guns. The only thing that brought me a faint shred of hope was that the cavalry was coming with. Surely they would only produce the cavalry if they felt we had a chance of success. And so we stood there, waiting, as the horse thumped its legs and allowed Lieutenant Crowley on, and Crowley shouted a number of words none of us heard, and then we waited for several minutes more until the German guns fell silent for a moment. And then my body was moving as mechanically as the guns, tugged myself over after the rush of mounted cavalry, black and white and brown steeds hurdling into the vast empty space of no man's land. In a shrieking, screaming rush, we followed.

[Pause.]

SCP-8918-A: To be wholly honest, I remember very little. I know I shot my Enfield. I might've hit someone. There was a lot of shouting. I remember smelling burning oil and hearing metal grinding against metal as we charged. I lifted my head and drifted towards the smoke, bullets whisking all around me. Shouting in German, French, English. A lumbering, ugly box that had keeled itself into a pit — one of those famously indestructible tanks.

Bennett: That was the first battle they were used in.

SCP-8918-A: You could tell. It was bleeding oil and listing forward dangerously. I got a hand underneath its treads and lifted it up, set it right, and it began inching forward again. Slowly crept forward, slow enough that I knew the German it had run over was dead long before I caught a look of his face. He had been crushed by the sheer weight of the thing landing on him in his trench, bones jutting through skin and a uniform almost wholly stained red. He was about my age. Dark hair, a sharp nose. Thin, whispy mustache. His eyes were bulging out of his skull. And then a horse's hoof caved his skull in, the cavalryman hardly even slowing down. And my head turned to look at that instead, and as I watched, our opening ended. The Germans had, it seems, cleared their jammed guns. "Fall back!" Voyageur shouted. But a cavalry charge, once begun, cannot be stopped. And one by one, like dominos, the horses began to fall by the half-dozen as the Maxim guns tore them up, screaming as they lurched and crashed to their sides, breaking ribs or legs on the way down, or falling into barbed wire or such. I crawled across the field — me and the others, and we did our best to pull away the men who had fallen. We came upon a cavalryman who was pinned by his thrashing steed, screaming in pain. Unthinkingly, I pulled him towards me; his lower half remained trapped by the horse, and his innards spilled out across the mud.

Bennett: Christ almighty.

SCP-8918-A: By then I was rather accustomed to the sight of blood, and like a machine, moved on. Ran directly into Hinterlander, who was frozen in place, eyes agape. The man who could never be stopped or flummoxed or confused, standing stock still. I imagine he was hearing the death cries of a hundred horses. But I dragged him back to the trench with me.

Blank: What did he say?

SCP-8918-A: Nothing at all. Not then. Just stared at the wall for quite some time. He spoke years later, when we returned to the site of the battle, after Versailles. It was deathly still, bereft of all life. The bodies had been cleared but the trenches had yet to be filled in. The generals wanted photographs of us at the site of our victory, you see, for the newspapers at home. We looked out across the battlefield. And nothing had changed.

Blank: What do you mean?

SCP-8918-A: We could have been standing there right then or five years prior or fifty. It would still be France. The border had been reset to the Rhine, as it had been for hundreds of years. No territory exchanged hands. No city was saved or razed. And Hinterlander turned to me, and asked so softly that I thought I had imagined it: "Why?"

[Silence.]

Blank: What did you tell him?

SCP-8918-A: The truth. That I didn't know.

<END EXCERPT>

<BEGIN EXCERPT>

[Dr. Blank has his notepad folded and set aside on the nightstand. He is leaning forward in his chair.]

Blank: Was fire really his weakness or was that bullshit?

SCP-8918-A: He tended to avoid open flames, but he never mentioned if they hurt. Just made him uncomfortable.

Blank: Neat. Bet he came in handy on the battlefield.

SCP-8918-A: Less so than you might imagine.

Blank: How's that?

SCP-8918-A: I don't know if that tripe about being the avatar of the North was hogwash or not. But his abilities were certainly more limited when we were over there.

Blank: No grand blizzards or snowstorms out of thin air?

SCP-8918-A: No. But still, when it did snow or sleet — and it did, frequently — he could be counted on to make sure the brunt of it hit the German lines instead of ours. Though it was still quite unbearable.

Blank: Complaining to Americans about the cold?

SCP-8918-A: It wasn't the cold. It was the wet. The cold bothered you, made you huddle up into your overcoat. But the wet? The wet soaked you and chilled you to the bone. The wet made your fingers wrinkle up like a prune and shake so hard you prayed no one came over because you doubted you'd be able to pull a trigger. Your feet would soak it up and the skin would start to rot off.

Blank: Fair enough.

SCP-8918-A: Like at Passchendaele. I caught my first bout of trench foot there. Miserable, disastrous shit-show, that.

Blank: That hardly seems particular to Passchendaele.

SCP-8918-A: The most miserable and disastrous shit-show out of a war filled with them, then.

Blank: What were you doing?

SCP-8918-A: Same as anyone else. Trying to survive. Back to Ypres, to where I'd first seen what this was really all like. This was the third attempt to take control of the region, you know? Just throwing men against it like dolls until the walls fell.

Blank: I understand it was unpopular even at the time.

SCP-8918-A: No one wanted another campaign in Flanders. It was a fool's errand, and so those in command were, of course, fools — Gough and Haig and all the others. We had shite orders to match out shite equipment — jamming rifles, wet ammunition, cardboard soles from people with cardboard souls. And to make the rest of us fools as well, it began to rain. And rain, and rain, and rain. It went from a delay to a problem to the slow realization that the command was going to make us strike against a well-defended village in the pouring, freezing rain.

Blank: That hardly seems advisable.

SCP-8918-A: Nate, he turned out to have a knack for tactics. Moving men, ambushes, all that. Some junior officers would defer to him, in the field. Not the senior officers, though. Never the senior officers.

Blank: They didn't like him?

SCP-8918-A: They didn't like enlisted men. We hadn't been to war college, you see — hadn't commanded an artillery brigade or mowed down scores of Hindoos wielding clubs in India. We were animals to be commanded. When a battle was a victory, it was owed to the tactical brilliance of the commander, and when a battle was a defeat, it was because the enlisted men were cowards and buffoons.

Blank: Nice to see administration never changes.

SCP-8918-A: Nate — the other soldiers looked up to him, now, as a sort of spokesman — tried to tell them in the general's tent that attacking in the rain was a disaster.

Blank: And I'm sure they listened and changed their plans accordingly.

SCP-8918-A: I remember when he came back to the trenches, sheets of rain crashing down, and told us straightforwardly that there would be no change; we would attack regardless of the weather. Tensions were high — we heard that some of the French had mutinied, and such patriotic sentiments were zipping about the trenches like wildfire. Nevertheless, two days later, the attack commenced.

Blank: And it went well?

SCP-8918-A: Well enough that midway into the advance we were being pummeled by German artillery so badly that Haig cancelled the attack. That first attack was a failure. So began two months of pointless, nipping exchanges with the Germans until we were ordered with the rest of the Canadian divisions to Ypres to relieve the Australians. I found myself in the same damnable trench I'd crawled into sobbing like a baby. It felt like a different life.

Blank: A long three years.

SCP-8918-A: But it finally gave us our crack at Passchendaele. It took us another month, but we eventually pushed the Germans out. It's a nothing village, rural, insignificant. Only useful for the hill it sits on. I remember me and Nate walking into this falling-apart village. Shops, houses, all reduced to rubble. The church steeple sagging dangerously. More potholes than cobblestone. A smear.

[Silence.]

SCP-8918-A: We just looked around for some time as the rest of the divisions began to filter in, set up tents, occupy the village. Clear out any last pockets of resistance. An officer rode in on his horse, launched into a spiel about how many of us had died, but their sacrifices were now avenged. We listened — just couldn't believe it, really.

Blank: That you'd finally done it?

SCP-8918-A: No. That this village could possibly be worth the half million dead men it took to claim it.

Blank: Mm. Did you talk to Nelson much, after coming back?

SCP-8918-A: No. We kept some correspondence. Exchanged Christmas cards. Nothing meaningful.

Blank: Why not?

SCP-8918-A: He came home and found out his two younger brothers had joined up while he was gone. They'd gone and gotten themselves killed at Verdun. I suppose I never really knew what to say, to that. He spent more and more time up north, saw him less and less down here, and then eventually I didn't see him at all.

<END EXCERPT>

<BEGIN EXCERPT>

[Dr. Blank's notepad is put away. He is staring at SCP-8918-A. Sgt. Mjr. Bennett stands by the window; the sun is setting. A box of pizza sits on the coffee table.]

Blank: And he still made up for his age in wit, right? That's what the books always showed.

SCP-8918-A: Aye. I was a boy myself but he was aboy. Couldn't have been older than fifteen. Smart, though.

Bennett: And they allowed him in?

SCP-8918-A: Things were different, then.

Blank: Lansky. He was Jewish?

SCP-8918-A: Aye. Why?

Blank: Nothing. Also the only one not to return.

SCP-8918-A: Mmh.

Blank: What happened? If you don't mind my asking.

SCP-8918-A: What do you mean?

Blank: I mean, how did he… pass?

SCP-8918-A: You can say die, boy.

Blank: Right. Okay. How did he die?

SCP-8918-A: He was always racing around. Made a fine scout, you can imagine. We were at Vimy Ridge — we were split up, for that one, across the divisions. I was to support the assault on Thelus, and Lansky was to rush ahead, scout out how dug-in the Germans were, so we would know whether the heavy artillery on the hills should focus on supporting our advance or bombard the village. I was in with the 3rd Division. It was chaos, you know? No idea what was happening.

Bennett: Worse than the trenches?

SCP-8918-A: No. Just a different kind of hell. But anyway. I told Lansky what to do — to go in, take a quick look-see, come back immediately. No being a hero.

Blank: Let me guess. He didn't listen?

SCP-8918-A: He listened perfectly. Just didn't expect that the Germans would already be retreating from Thelus and fortifying themselves higher up the ridge. He ran in, straight into a cloud of poison gas.

Blank: Oh.

SCP-8918-A: He showed up back to our position in the flash of an eye, coughing and wheezing and stumbling. The gas shreds your lungs, you know, and he breathed so much — on account of the running — that it'd just been going around and around in his chest. He was spitting up blood while he was trying to tell us about the gas, and then he died.

Blank: I'm sorry.

SCP-8918-A: Yeah.

Blank: I don't think it was your fault.

SCP-8918-A: The hell would it be my fault? I'm not the Hun that ordered poison gas be pumped into a village.

Blank: Yeah, I'm just saying—

SCP-8918-A: Yeah.

[Silence.]

SCP-8918-A: You asked me an awful lot of questions today, boy. I get one?

Blank: Depends. What do you want to know?

SCP-8918-A: Are you a cat?

Blank: Not last I checked, no.

SCP-8918-A: Then you should probably cough up that hairball you've been letting marinate in your throat all damn day.

Bennett: What?

SCP-8918-A: Look at him. Pretending he didn't give a damn about the stories. You grew up on those damn books, didn't you?

Blank: I had a couple. Dozen.

[SCP-8918-A breaks into a coughing fit.]

SCP-8918-A: Worst damn decision I ever made. Nonsense stories. Filling young peoples' heads with ideas about how we heroically pushed back the Huns. Bullshit. Bullshit.

Blank: They're stories about heroes. They were good for me. Gave me something to look up to.

SCP-8918-A: Nothing heroic about any god-damned thing that happened over there.

Blank: And definitely not after.

SCP-8918-A: Ah-ah. There it is. I ought to have known it'd be about that.

Bennett: What's he talking about?

SCP-8918-A: How when they asked us, twenty years later, to go back to Europe, to do it all over again, we were the only ones smart enough to say no.

[Silence.]

Bennett: What?

Blank: I get it, okay? World War I was a shitshow. Needless, pointless bloodshed. Didn't need to happen. It's tragic. But you can'tseriously think it was the same the second time around.

SCP-8918-A: It's always the same, son.

Blank: Yeah, okay, war is hell. We know that. It's awful and horrible and evil. But you don't thinksome things are worth fighting for?

SCP-8918-A: It's their war. Let them deal with it instead of sending our sons to die again.

Blank: They were fucking Nazis!

SCP-8918-A: They were on the other side of the planet. Europeans fighting Europeans, again, dragging us into their squabbles.

Blank: Youcannot be dumb enough to think it would never come home. And even if it never did — it was genocide! Plenty of other people who served saw that and volunteered.

SCP-8918-A: What concern is it of mine what a lunatic dictator in Germany or Italy or wherever else wants to do to his people?

Blank:(Sputtering) You were alive then! You must've seen the papers, the pictures — Auschwitz and Dachau and Buchenwald. It's nakedly evil! How the hell can you say that wasn't our problem?

SCP-8918-A: Why should we bleed for every injustice?

Blank: Because that's what heroes are supposed to do!

[Silence.]

Blank: You know how many kids read those books? Grew up hearing about how you saved a platoon in Passchendaele or rescued an entire village of French children at Verdun? Wanted to be like you? And you turn around and let me know that hey, actually, youshouldn't intervene in the most monstrous injustice in human history. That, no, you won't rise above the petty politics and do the right thing. What the hell kind of message does that send?

[He pauses.]

Blank: Letthem know.

[Silence. SCP-8918-A's heart monitor beeps steadily.]

SCP-8918-A:(Quietly) We weren't heroes. We were god-damned kids playing costume. We thought helping people was saving a burning building or taking a cat down from a tree. And they took us, and fed us into the meat grinder.

Blank: Yeah. They did. And I'm sorry that happened. But that doesn't make the rest of it okay.

[SCP-8918-A is silent for several moments before finally looking up. His eyes are hard.]

SCP-8918-A: Awfully easy to say from that chair. Had you been where I've been — seen what I've seen — you'd do anything to stop even one other kid from having to do any of that.Anything.

Blank: Then I guess I'm glad I didn't turn out like you when I grew up.

<END EXCERPT>