It is later that same day. The faded yellow lies reflected in the dying sun. It is small now, paper thin and so easily wounded. Fingers linger on bayonet bullet holes, picked up in a flood of sunlight all crazy-faced and grinning until the fall onto the broken bottle that opened the skin as easily as cloth, yet not so easily mended. The blood was never entirely washed away. Now the stains mingle field-dust with river-mud with life-blood until they form a patchwork almost intentional in its variety.
Seams come undone, colors fade, dust settles, until moths destroy what innocent dignity remains. The tiny breast pocket is fraught with dangling thread, empty now where once could be found perfect pebbles, iridescent beetle husks and beach-worn glass; a piece of charcoal scrounged from a fire, a pennywhistle. What mementos might larger pockets hold? A few sparse letters, self-censored; a spent bullet that took not his life but nearly an ear before hissing into the rockform behind him; the stub of a pencil, unused for months. Each with, perhaps, its counterpart in that worn-down shirt pocket, but the childhood versions overlaid by this far graver reality.
The world shakes from a mortar shell, and the scarcity of curses forms a dreadful ambiguity. The ground beneath sobs more human than any combatant as the terror rips them from life as automatons reclaimed in death by earth more human than before and they are laid out in rows like a freshly harvested field with faces more human than angels. Once-again boys, wearing running laughing in shirts more memory than fabric of reality. Welcomed back as human as everybody.
Hands gather cloth into comforting bundles. They cradle the shirt, empty of life. They would cradle a head, a neck, the entire body of a man outgrown by life. The broken necessity of it, the paramount falsity withers fig-like upon the branch.
Wrinkles become the folded land through which he fought: a ridgeline where they rested, a deep crease where the delaying action claimed him, the endless hills between his resting place and anything peaceful. The thunderous roar of artillery swallows the cries of men; the mountains are swallowed by the gathering storm. The rain patters on the window sill. Drops fall onto the shirt, spreading out to claim every inch like rising floodwaters, safely inside.