His father remembered a count of sixteen men standing when the guns quieted; he kept no account of how many perished before breakfast from wounds received the night before. The sixteen of them started back through the line in search of the command. The senior officers had, in fact, retreated hours beforehand, back to the safety of the ships in the harbor in their armored wagons, tugged along by dray horses that were half mad and all but totally blind from the effects of the chlorine gas. The cannoneers and the stretcher bearers, both of whom were considered spectators by his father and the rest of the fighting men, had followed in their commanders’ inchoate footsteps. It was rainy and marshy. To Ted’s father’s surprise, all of Asia Minor had not proven to be arid and biblical. He trod upon soggy, dark green bedding, his father told Ted, hearing, now and again, the sound of dead bones breaking. The smoke hung like a ragged bunting following a parade. Faces swam out of the mire. Maybe his father felt the shameful elation of being alive. Maybe for a moment there before he realized that the dead had no more battles to fight and that the abyssal shore had to be a comparative paradise. There could be no hell beyond this one.

Then he heard it. Augmented by the hissing of the downpour, it was the chilliest sound imaginable and yet no other sound could have warmed the men back to life. It was the seventeenth survivor, a fife man sitting waist-deep in the russet-colored mud beside a broken drum that was filling up with black rain. The fifers had not been issued gas masks because they couldn’t very well muster a melody through a pachyderm’s nozzle and therefore they had, on the whole, grown understandably scarce in the Gallipoli campaign. The survival of this particular musician was something that the chaplain should look into, that is if the chaplain had survived the battle himself. The piper’s elbows were high, and his head was reared in the manner of the Dixieland musician. From the look of him, he was trying to sell his soul to the heavens, and the heavens were driving an antipathetically hard bargain. But the music did not sound anything like it looked. There was no vibrato and no nuance at all, but for the unbroken, lustrous lone chord of its tone. Who could he be calling with such resonance? No matter, no man among them had ever seen anything so ludicrously brave, nor heard any sound so nakedly vulnerable. There was always and there always would be, amid chaos, some manna of stopgap salvation, even if that stopgap salvation happened to be death itself. Here on the field of slaughter, it was the fife man’s silvery voice that restored the gravity of death by singing to the heavens of the precariousness of life. And this is what poetry was, as Ted’s father never said to him and never once had to. The dreamy and unequivocal return of the senses at the moment when one’s salvation depended entirely upon it. Every other means of communication pretty much amounted to the time of day while poetry qualified as the articulation of time immemorial.

One of the soldiers, hardly in any shape to stand himself, had the piper up on his back before any of them realized that the little man’s legs had been blown off. The soldier stood wading in three-quarters of the piper’s blood volume. They took his flute away and cleaned it in the rain. Without it, the fife man continued to whistle.

“Did he live?” Ted remembered asking his father.

“No,” he said. You could see in the shrinkage of his eyes how it pained him.