Later, nearly everyone realized that the war was the major reference point in their lives. Afterward you could say “before the war” and “after the war”, and everyone knew exactly what you meant. But at the time, caught up in daily life, you just didn’t notice. It was more like walking along an open path that became hedged, then forested, then you might glance aside to see high berms. You might have the thought that you couldn’t leave the path; the only choice was to keep on. But maybe you wouldn’t have that thought. Once you start on a path, you expect to follow it to your destination. Before the war, destinations were something people thought they had. After the war, things had changed.
At the time, you just found yourself in it, in the war and there was nothing to do but continue. The things you would do every day might not have changed much, really. You awoke, you ate, you worked, you rested. But you didn’t feel the same about anything. Before the war it had seemed like the world would send you messages from time to time; coincidences, signs, nudges that told you “yes, you are here, you matter”. You’d go on your way, and every so often there would come another confirming flash of recognition from the world.
During the war a kind of silence fell. There were never any messages, never any recognition. Live or die, exist or don’t, just get on with it and leave, like everyone else. There was not the trace of a trace.
The things you would do every day might be very different. This was the experience for the man whose name was not Howard Endicott. Wearing a uniform, carrying a rifle, moving along the fatal path, Howard Endicott encountered another man who had been his client when he worked in the bank.
Endicott was by himself in the forest through some accident; the group of men he had been walking with had taken a turn he hadn’t noticed, or perhaps he had taken the turn. He wasn’t afraid of being alone. Or really he was no more afraid than usual, fear being the humidity in which he lived then. He recognized the same fear in the other soldiers in his unit, and had said to them that fear was a physical thing you couldn’t avoid. Fear, he said, was like a place you found yourself or your height or the texture of your hair.
When they had been taken from their previous lives, before the war, and turned into soldiers, there had been training, both for their bodies and for their minds. Endicott had listened to his training at first and had quickly worked out that he was expected to believe certain things. First, that being shot to death, while it would of course be inconvenient, could also be a good thing. Not for him of course, but…he hadn’t followed the argument further. The next thing he was expected to believe was that he and his fellows were closer than friends; as interdependent as a close family. Endicott had had a family, although their name was not Endicott. And the third thing he must believe was that the soldiers in the other armies — and there were several other armies, for this war was all-encompassing — were far inferior to him and his fellows, and thus…he hadn’t followed the rest of that argument either.
Howard Endicott was not a person who held deep beliefs — or so he deeply believed. But he was a careful observer and a consummate actor, and knew how to act exactly as though he believed the things he and the other soldiers had been told to believe. He did so very convincingly, but after the first two years this began to have an effect on him. He would find himself lost in something like thought, although he was not always sure, afterwards, exactly what he had been thinking. But his perceptions would turn inward and after the effect faded, he would find that he had no memory of what he had been doing outwardly. he was confident that his companions had never noticed anything untoward (it was the sort of thing they would be sure to mention). But this time, alone in the woods, he had somehow lost contact with them, and they would, he was sure, notice that.
As he considered how to go about finding and rejoining his unit, he heard a short sequence of metallic sounds and a voice telling him to halt. He halted, because the metallic sound was unmistakably made with a rifle. The sounds and the voice came from behind him, but there was one curious thing; the command to halt had been spoken quietly.
Endicott understood that there was much more to the command than just the word itself. There was a soldier behind him, probably wearing a different uniform, and “halt” really meant “stop taking steps forward and stand still and drop your rifle. But be careful about it just in case you are careless or untrained or frighted or stupid and the rifle is ready to fire, because in that case it might go off by being dropped. Raise your hands, arrange your posture in an aspect of relative submission obviously enough that you will not increase the degree of stress in this fraught situation — but also do not overdo it because that would be embarrassing for both of us.” Endicott did all of those things, turning around slowly.
He recognized Grindell at the same moment Grindell evidently recognized him. “Endicott!” exclaimed Grindell (using, it must be said, the name Endicott had been known by at that time), “I remember you from the bank!” Endicott smiled and acknowledged that he, too, remembered those meetings. Grindell had been a client; a businessman who from time to time visited the bank to arrange to borrow money for his business. Endicott had as a matter of course loaned the money and Grindell had as a matter of course paid it back as his business slowly thrived. Nearer the war, of course, as arrangements as mundane as business and lending and having meetings began to fray, the payments had slowed. Endicott had not taken any action because there was little Grindell could have done in any case. Eventually such arrangements disintegrated entirely and payments were abandoned. In normal times action would have been taken then, but Endicott had by then left the bank, Grindell had abandoned the pretense of his business, and there was no longer anyone to care. The arrangement had produced many pages of contracts and records, and those changed as well, losing their importance and becoming no more than refuse wafting in the smoke.
For some awkward moments Endicott and Grindell were wedged between their mutual understanding from before the war — their natural affinity as businessman and banker — and the understanding that was evidently expected of them now — two soldiers wearing subtly different clothing and carrying weapons. As they were working out exactly what they were meant to do next, they each noticed something about the other. Each uniform included a small name patch, and as Grindell noted that Endicott’s patch did not say “Endicott,” Endicott noted that Grindell’s did not read “Grindell.”
In Endicott’s army the name “Endicott” would have caused problems, as it was too closely associated with people who, although they had much in common, everyone in Endicott’s army had been instructed to despise. The same was true of Grindell; like Endicott he had changed his name to suggest allegiance, but to a different group. Grindell lowered his rifle and they both laughed. Then the men sat down facing each other, backs against trees and talked. They assured each other that they remembered the days of the bank and the business, the cafe just near the bank (they had both noticed the other frequenting it), and the quality of the air back in those days, lacking as it did the humidity of fear that now you couldn’t escape.
Grindell volunteered that he still owed a debt to Endicott. Endicott demurred, explaining the debt had been to the bank, not to him, and he believed the bank was gone now, and in any case he, Endicott, now owed Grindell his life or at least his freedom. Grindell demurred again and included the pleasantness of their meeting as another thing to be owned. Endicott opened the heavy pack he had been obliged to carry and took out a tin of sausages to share. Grindell countered with a flask of brandy. They ate and drank together, and realized there was now a new understanding between them, as friends.
Finally the time came to part. Endicott explained that he wasn’t sure how he had been separated from his unit and didn’t know which direction he should take. Grindell confessed that his situation was much the same. They pondered their dilemma. “If we blunder into my army first,” said Endicott, “you’ll be penned up or worse.”
“And the same will be in store for you if we end up on my side,” offered Grindell. “I don’t want that fate for you.”
“Nor I for you,” Endicott agreed. “How can we get out of this?”
Neither of them had a solution, so they decided to simply hope for the best. They chose a direction and set out, both carrying their weapons and agreeing that whichever army they encountered, one would explain that the other was a prisoner. To bolster their story they unloaded their rifles, planning to explain that they were forcing the prisoner — whichever one that might be — to carry the weapon as a prize. No one would think to inspect the captor’s gun or find that it, too, was empty.
Endicott and Grindell had hoped for the best, and perhaps that is what occurred. They met neither army, but stumbled across a company from a third. The third army was not allied with either Endicott’s nor Grindell’s forces, but neither were there open hostilities between them, Rather, the third army was intent upon vanquishing a fourth, and both the third and fourth armies were hoping for assistance from Endicott’s side, or from Grindell’s, or, ideally, from both. To their surprise, Endicott and Grindell were treated as guests and invited to accompany the soldiers to their destination, which was a small seaport. From there, they were assured, they would be given passage to their respective sides. The question of who might have been the captive and who might have been the prisoner never arose.
When they arrived at the seaport the officers of the company were overworked, and as they had no reason to fear anything from either Grindell nor Endicott, simply wished them luck and sent them off. Grindell and Endicott found that the seaport, full of people from all sides in the war (and there were many sides), was perfect for them. They bought civilian clothes and abandoned their uniforms. They found passage, not to Grindell’s side, nor to Endicott’s, but to a distant port that, so far, at least, had not been drawn into the conflict at all.
The long voyage gave them a chance to plan. By their arrival, the man whose name was not Endicott and the man whose name was not Grindell had freshly invented names and stories. They settled in the distant port, where they were accepted and not closely observed — so that no one ever noted that, nearly alone among men of their generation, neither Endicott nor Grindell ever said the words “before the war.”
