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Lisselton should only be let out after dark.”
    The sun beat down as they rode on. For as long as they could see the bog across the flat parish, Matt's snowy head gleamed against the brown land.
    When the trauma first struck him, Captain Shannons brain heaved like the sea. Then it began to swirl, a blood-spattered fog inside his head. In a sudden moment he stopped in his tracks, stock-still and wild-eyed. He turned his head slowly, like a searchlight on a stiff axis, and nobody in the busy tent took heed.
    Then he roared, and they looked up in surprise and saw him claw at himself. He plucked at his clothing, his ears, his nose, his hair. He lost his sense of presence and began to lurch and spin. He made vast hand-washing movements, as though to rid himself of some great clinging filth.
    They grabbed him and held him and lowered him to a bed in the already overwhelmed field hospital at Lucy-le-Bocage, the village beneath Belleau Wood.
    Why did he snap? He had braved so much, why now? Within moments the depth of his trauma became clear. His was a bad case. He recognized nobody; he had forgotten who or what he was and didn't know his own name.
    His comrades, though— they knew what he had been and what he had done, and they cared for him now as they cared for no other. A military nurse named Kennedy, with hands cool as grass, took him over and set up the first nurtures. Night and day she watched him, especially as he came out of the harbor of sedation. But his condition never changed; he drooled and yelled, and he knew not a single thing.
    Three days later the generals invalided Shannon out to Dieppe, and he stayed there for the next four months in a château converted to a rest home. In late October, the army loaded him on a troopship; one of the officers gave up his cabin so that they could rig a private sick bay for the chaplain's voyage home.
    In the hospital at New Haven he grew milder over time. Officers of all stripes visited him. They knew he might not be able to speak—might not even be awake. It didn't matter to them; they came just to look at this legend of the war, hoping to shake his hand. If and when he calmed down, he had lucid moments and could almost chat with them, and they thought he nearly understood this awful malady that ailed him.
    At first, shell shock had been misinterpreted. Officers claimed that such men were playacting in order to avoid fighting, so the generals court-martialed them for malingering or desertion. They even executed some by firing squad, in full view of camps or trenches: a blindfold, a wooden post or tree, a semicircle of rifles, and a victim who didn't know what was happening. Others were disciplined. In one form of punishment the offending man was tied standing up in the field of battle, sent back into the midst of what had damaged him— the incessant noise, the frightful whistle, and the
krummmp!
of the artillery.
    Nobody as yet knew that the shells exploding around these frontline soldiers were also causing cranial vacuums. The reverberations shifted brain matter inside men's skulls and altered their states of consciousness.
    Even so, back in the United States, Robert Shannon rose from this pit. He climbed out, and resumed his life. Through strength of character and force of will he came back to himself and then propelled himself forward. He improved steadily. They knew he was recovering when they saw his kindness return. Day by day he began to talk to other traumatized men in the hospital, the open mouthed creatures whose spirits were not nearly so firm. He smiled at them, held their hands, brought them small gifts, eased their sobs, listened to their ceaseless, senseless words.
    One day he began to pray with them— and finally he asked whether he could celebrate Mass. Within a month he had braved the outside world again, and eventually a day arrived when he took off his uniform, put his chaplain's black tabs in the drawer, and went back to being a priest.
    Less than a year