His own tattered clothes had stopped resembling anything like a uniform weeks further back. Not that that would do anything to limit simple detection of his country of origin. He knew this for himself all too well, moving on instinct now like a dog, he would pick out any number of differing former Austria-Hungarian regional garments and just as quickly react based on their varying levels of enmity for their own nominal state and his own. This was because no matter what country it was--of even sometimes regiment--the very fabric--tho a ubiquitous dull, heavy wool--was always and only of some very telltale color used only particularly there. And no matter that state of repair--even a pack sown onto a jacket could bespeak murder most foul of an otherwise uninterested onlookers countryman--the mere fibers of thread evidenced the origin. And it was sad that they were all still somehow the dullest of shades. Those blunted with mud in production as if bending their heads down before the inevitable future in the trenches.
The thicket, he would have given it a guess but refrained, seemed to be humming. The melody more jaunty than he'd have thought possible anymore, anymore now being one of those words that he could not remove his own personal history from. The world of not anymore wasn't the things he'd seen, the truth that the world had just brutally revealed to itself, but simply that he'd been marked in an all too specific way that would bias his every notion, literally enter his words and contaminate it like a drop of white paint in black. Like that, he'd watched it disappear at first, like the drop could just be a drop, maybe he'd bury it away or wear it on the open, but no, it disappeared for just a second, but as the stir stick of time went on stirring everything turned a faint gray. Nothing more than gray now the inextricable writing on him and in him anymore or evermore. Tho that was still just a word for poets.