Night at the camp was what I imagine night in any encampment is. It roughly resembles my military unit's camps at the edge of a battle scene, but not yet immanently in danger. Here too there is a sort of preparedness, a resolve to move out the next day into the unknown that is nonetheless imagined in its full terrible reality.
I was stitched into a card game beneath some oil lamps hung around a large central picnic style table. I hadn't met any of the men as yet, tho I'd worked with one or two of them throughout the day. Maggie set me up to join them saying they were the most diverse younger crowd and that I was likely to have a bit in common with them.
In fact I did. Once I adjusted to the cigar haze and the dim, but warm yellow light, I noticed a large blocky fellow under a slouched cap. He had a bristly black mustache like a fancy soldier putting on airs, like a short fat push broom for cleaning the wet Paris streets. Stout, gruff, like any long shoreman, a shadow dweller.
-PeteO. You son of bitch. The dim man said to me not looking up from under his hat. Slapping down what presumably was a winning hand and scrapping in his pile of winnings. Give your old friend a nice hello.
When he looked up I caught a glimpse of my too early ended military career. The fat mercenary Merc, of my own very own regiment was here of all places in Southern France playing cards in the very same group of ragamuffins I'd fallen in with. And he didn't seem to be missing any prominent parts at that.
