Jacques Tardi

Moreover, man carries in his heart the desire always to wield his scientific knowledge in service of the greater good. He would of course never use it for destructive purposes. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! ...

The leave zipped right by. We were so terrifically glad to be back to our own little section of the trench, with all its happy memories, that we wouldn__ have traded places with anybody. The lazy bastard who__ filled in while we were away hadn__ managed to nibble away so much as an inch of garden soil in the direction of Berlin.We found out that Brugnon hadn__ come back from leave. He__ hanged himself in the stairwell of his building, on rue des Gâtines. He left a note to say he couldn__ take it any more and asked us to count him out. We accepted it_ Who were we to judge?

The last time I saw Collin was in 1917, at the foot of Mort-Homme.Before the great slaughter, Collin__ been an avid angler. On that day, he was standing at the hole, watching maggots swarm among blow flies on two boys that we couldn__ retrieve for burial without putting our own lives at risk.And there, at the loop hole, he thought of his bamboo rods, his flies and the new reel he hadn__ even tried out yet.Collin was imaging himself on the riverbank, wine cooling in the current his stash of worms in a little metal box and a maggot on his hook, writhing like_ Holy shit. Were the corpses getting to him?Collin. The poor guy didn__ even have time to sort out his thoughts. In that split second, he was turned into a slab of bloody meat. A white hot hook drilled right through him and churned through his guts, which spilled out of a hole in his belly.He was cleared out of the first aid station. The major did triage. Stomach wounds weren__ worth the trouble. There were all going to die anyway, and besides, he wasn__ equipped to deal with them.Behind the aid station, next to a pile of wood crosses, there was a heap of body parts and shapeless, oozing human debris laid out on stretchers, stirred only be passing rats and clusters of large white maggots. But on their last run, the stretcher bearers carried him out after all_ Old Collin was still alive.From the aid station to the ambulance and from the ambulance to the hospital, all he could remember was his fall into that pit, with maggots swarming over the open wound he had become from head to toe_ Come to think of it, where was his head? And what about his feet?In the ambulance, the bumps were so awful and the pain so intense that it would have been a relief to pass out. But he didn__. He was still alive, writhing on his hook. They carved up old Collin good. They fixed him as best they could, but his hands and legs were gone. So much for fishing.Later, they pinned a medal on him, right there in that putrid recovery room.And later still, they explained to him about gangrene and bandages packed with larvae that feed on death tissue. He owed them his life. From one amputation and operation to the next _ thirty-eight in all _ the docs finally got him __ack on his feet_. But by then, the war was long over.