Professor Julien Moreau had been conscripted as a combat philosopher, which was not supposed to be a real job, which was exactly the point.

He sat in the trench with Sergeant Morin and the other soldiers, a leather-bound copy of Camus in his satchel and a rifle across his knees that he had never learned how to use properly, and he thought about the absurdity of his situation.

A philosophy professor in a trench. A man who had spent his career thinking about meaning and existence and the human condition, now sitting in mud and cold and darkness, waiting for an order to go over the top and die for a piece of ground that had already changed hands three times in the past week.

The Great Silence had come two days ago. No one was sure what had caused it—an electromagnetic weapon, a solar flare, God's punishment, the universe's way of laughing at human ambition. It did not matter. The result was the same: all electronic systems were dead. Radios, GPS, drones, targeting computers, everything that had made modern warfare precise and efficient and sanitized, gone.

Without technology, war was just what it had always been: men in mud, shooting at other men in mud, for reasons that no one could quite remember.

"Hey, Philosopher," Sergeant Morin said, not looking up from the rifle he was cleaning with the meticulous care of a man who found comfort in routine. "You ever shoot a real human being?"

Moreau considered the question. "In my classes, I have shot many human beings with words. With ideas. With arguments."

Morin snorted. "That ain't what I meant."

Moreau looked at the sergeant. Morin was a good man, in the way that men who had accepted their own absurdity were good men. He did not pretend the war made sense. He did not pray for victory. He cleaned his rifle and shared his cigarettes and made dry jokes about the mud, and he would go over the top tomorrow because that was his job, and he would probably die because that was the odds, and he had made peace with both facts.

"No," Moreau said. "I have never shot a human being."

"Good," Morin said. "Means you still got some humanity left. Shame about the rest of us."

The soldier next to Morin—Deschamps, a factory worker before the war, now a soldier who had forgotten how to do anything else—laughed. It was a tired laugh, the kind that came from men who had been laughing for too long and were running out of things to laugh at.

"I heard the French are coming tomorrow," Deschamps said. "Or maybe it's the others. I can't keep track anymore. Who's coming?"

"Does it matter?" Morin asked.

"Maybe," Deschamps said. "Might be nice to know who you're shooting at."

Moreau thought about this. In the old war—the war before the Silence, when technology had made everything clear and precise and distant—you did not need to know who you were shooting at. You pressed a button, a missile flew, something exploded on a screen three thousand kilometers away, and you went home to your family and told them you had served your country.

Now there were no buttons. No missiles. No screens. Now you had to look the man in the eye across from you in the mud and decide whether to pull the trigger, and that was a decision no human being should have to make.

"The enemy is irrelevant," Moreau said quietly. "The absurdity is not in who we fight, but that we fight at all."

Morin looked at him. "You talk funny, Philosopher."

"I am a philosopher," Moreau said. "Talking funny is part of the job."

Deschamps laughed again, and this time there was something real in it, something that might have been amusement or might have been the sound of a man holding onto his sanity by a thread.

"You know," Deschamps said, "I used to work in a factory. I made parts for cars. Simple parts. Bolts, mostly. Every day I made the same bolt, and every night I went home and ate dinner and slept and woke up and made the same bolt again. And now I'm in a war where I shoot the same man every day, and every night I sleep in mud, and every morning I wake up and shoot him again."

He paused, looking at the trench wall, at the mud and the broken wood and the occasional piece of shell that had been human once.

"Isn't that what Camus said? About Sisyphus? Pushing the rock up the hill?"

Moreau felt something move in his chest. This factory worker, who had never studied philosophy in his life, had understood something that Moreau had spent twenty years teaching in lecture halls.

"Yes," Moreau said. "That is exactly what Camus said. The absurd is the repetition without meaning. The rock always rolls down. The war always continues. The bolt is always the same."

"Then why are we here?" Deschamps asked, and his voice was not bitter. It was just tired. Just asking a question that had no answer.

Moreau looked at the sky. It was gray and low and full of clouds that looked like they might bring rain or snow or nothing at all. The world was indifferent. The universe did not care about wars or bolts or Sisyphus or the men in the trench who were waiting to go over the top and probably die.

"Because we are here," Moreau said. "That is the only answer Camus gave. We are here, and the world is absurd, and the only honest response is to live anyway. To push the rock up the hill even though it will roll down. To shoot the man in the other trench even though tomorrow you might be the one in the mud."

Morin was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "You know, Philosopher, you talk like a man who's never had to push a rock."

Maybe he was right. Maybe Moreau was a coward, hiding behind words and books and philosophy while real men did the real work of surviving in a world that had lost its mind.

But then Morin reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and offered it to Moreau, and something in that small gesture—a shared cigarette in a trench, a moment of human connection in a war that had none—made Moreau realize that maybe philosophy was not useless after all.

Maybe the point was not to find meaning in the absurd, but to find each other in it.

He took the cigarette. Morin lit it with a match that flared bright in the gray darkness. Moreau inhaled, felt the smoke fill his lungs, felt the warmth spread through his chest.

"Thank you," he said.

Morin nodded. "Tomorrow's gonna be a long day, Philosopher. You gonna be alright?"

Moreau looked at his rifle. He looked at the trench wall. He looked at the two men who had become, in the space of a few weeks, the only people in the world whose opinions he cared about.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "But I'll push the rock."

Morin smiled. It was a small smile, but it was real. "That's all any of us can do, ain't it?"

The rain started an hour later. It fell softly at first, then harder, turning the trench floor to sludge and making them all huddle closer together for warmth. Moreau sat with his back against the trench wall, Camus in his satchel, a rifle across his knees, and two men beside him in the darkness, and he thought about the absurdity of it all.

The war made no sense. The Silence made no sense. His presence in this trench made no sense.

But he was here. And they were here. And for now, in the rain and the mud and the darkness, that was enough.