The first time I saw the flowers, I was standing in a trench outside Thiepval, and the sky had turned the color of bruised plum, and the flowers were growing in the shell craters—small white things with petals like tissue paper, blooming in the mud where nothing should grow.

"They're beautiful, aren't they?" I said to the man beside me.

He was not beside me. He had been dead for three days. But I was not aware of this at the time.

My name is Arthur Blackwood, and I am a poet, and the war has made me mad. I know this now, though I did not know it then. Then I knew only that the world had become a place where dead men stood in the rain and flowers grew from the wounds of the earth, and I was one of the men who stood in the rain, and I was writing poems that no one would ever read.

I came to the front from London, where I had been a minor poet of minor reputation, publishing slim volumes that sold well enough to keep me in wine and bad decisions. I had no military training. I had no particular bravery. I had a commission because my father knew a man who knew a general, and in 1916, commissions were distributed like ration cards—according to connections, not merit.

The first shell took my left ear. Not literally—I still have it—but it took something behind it, something that connected hearing to understanding. After that, sounds were sounds, but they didn't mean what they used to mean. A whistle was not an artillery warning; it was the sound a woman makes when she's laughing, and I would look around for her, and she would not be there.

The second thing the war took was my sense of time. Days bled into nights, and nights bled into days, and I could no longer tell when I was awake and when I was dreaming. Sometimes I would be writing a poem in the trench, and the pencil would move across the page, and I would realize that I had been writing the same line for an hour: "The flowers are beautiful, the flowers are beautiful, the flowers are—"

The third thing the war took was the boundary between myself and the dead.

Their names were Patrick, and Henry, and Billy, and dozens of others whose faces I can no longer distinguish. They stood in the trench with me, and they spoke to me in voices that were either real or imagined, and they told me things—about their mothers, about the girls they left behind, about the taste of their mother's cooking, which was always soup.

"Soup," Patrick would say. "Always soup. And I'd give anything for a proper roast with Yorkshire pudding."

"I had roast once," Henry would add. "In a hotel in Brighton. The chef was French. He cried when he plated it, which seemed excessive."

They were dead. I knew this, in the way you know things that are too large to fully know. But they were also alive, standing in the trench beside me, complaining about the soup, and I would nod and say "Soup is terrible" and mean it with every fiber of my being.

Diana received my letters. She was my fiancée, and she was patient, and she loved me in the way that young women loved young men in 1916—completely, blindly, and with a courage that I would not deserve.

My letters grew stranger. I wrote her about the flowers. I wrote her about the way the sky changed color depending on how many men had died that day. I wrote her about a garden that existed just beyond the trench line, where the dead walked among roses that bloomed in every color except red—because red was too much, and the earth had had enough red for one lifetime.

"The garden is beautiful," I wrote in one letter. "The dead are tending the roses. They are very good gardeners. They understand that beauty and death are the same thing, which is why they don't frighten each other."

Diana wrote back that she was worried. She wrote that my last letter had been difficult to read. She wrote that her mother had suggested I see a doctor.

"I am a doctor," I wrote back. "I am a poet and a soldier and a doctor of flowers. I understand them better than anyone."

She did not write again for two weeks. When she did, her letter was short. "Please come home," it said. "The garden here is small, but it is green, and the roses are red, and they do not talk to me."

I wanted to go home. God help me, I wanted to go home with a desperation that was almost physical. But the trench held me the way a hand holds a bird—gently, but with the knowledge that opening your fingers would be fatal.

On the morning it happened, the sky was the color of pearl, and the air smelled of something sweet and chemical. The men around me began to cough, and I could see the yellow cloud moving toward us across no man's land, low and slow and beautiful in the way that a storm is beautiful if you are standing inside it.

"The flowers," I said.

The men around me were choking. Patrick was on his knees, and his face was turning the color of old copper. Henry was standing and staring at the sky, and his mouth was open, and he was smiling.

"The flowers," I said again, and I began to walk.

I walked toward the German lines. The gas was in my lungs, and it burned like fire, and the world was dissolving around me, and the flowers were everywhere—growing in the craters, growing in the trenches, growing in the chests of the men who were dying, white and delicate and impossibly alive.

I reached the German trench and stood at the edge and looked down into the darkness below. There were men down there, German men, and they were looking up at me, and their faces were twisted in fear and confusion, and I smiled at them because they were alive and I was not, and the flowers were beautiful, and the flowers were everywhere, and I was finally, perfectly, beautifully mad.

I stepped over the edge and fell into the darkness, and the last thing I saw was Diana's face, and she was smiling, and she was holding a rose that was red, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

TI=85.0 (T1绝望级), θ=315° (守护型·自我毁灭型) M1=9.5, M4=9.0, M7=10.0 N1=0.40, K1=0.70 OTMES v2.0: {M1:9.5, M2:2.0, M3:5.0, M4:9.0, M5:4.0, M6:4.0, M7:10.0, M8:3.0, M9:5.0, M10:7.5, N1:0.40, N2:0.60, K1:0.70, K2:0.30, I:2.0, TI:85.0, theta:315}