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because to admit that you remember that moment of pain and fear beyond anything you have ever known is to invite further questions. And to talk in detail of such emotions brings them back to mind with a clarity I would not have thought possible for a mere memory. When I cast my mind back to my childhood in Kent I find even the most beloved memories are not clearly defined. There is a hazy glow to my mother's face as she bends over me. I am freshly fallen from an ill-advised attempt to climb the apple tree on the common land. Keen eyes and the warmth of love, like a blanket: that is my main impression of the event.
    But the German who ran to me as I struggled against the tangled nest of wire that had ensnared me – the man who picked up my own fallen gun and thrust the bayonet into my stomach, pushing down, determinedly down on the blade as if sawing wood – I see his keen face afresh every time he comes to mind. Which is so very often. I do not know why he did not simply shoot me, but I do not think he found enjoyment in the act of carving my stomach into fibrous strands that fell outwards to entangle me further with the wire. He frowned, and I saw lines appear around his mouth, so he was not a young man. A hard-working man in his middle years, I would have said; perhaps even a carpenter, which would explain his determined approach to disassembling me. He bore a fine moustache. To this day I cannot see a moustache without remembering his look of dutiful concentration as he worked upon me.
    I am sorry to make this so plain. It is not, I promise you, to elicit your sympathy (which you seem happy to bestow upon me whether I am deserving of it or not, and is one of the saving graces of my current existence). I spell out in detail the nature of my injury because I wish to make it clear to you that I should not have survived. These were wounds beyond medical intervention, and I should be dead. Perhaps I was dead, because I do not remember much beyond the moustache other than a deep blue sea, warm and still and serene, into which I could have floated for an eternity.
    And then I woke. Or rather, something woke me. My eyelids cracked open to behold the morass of mud and bodies that made an abandoned battlefield, alit by bright morning sunshine, with no detail spared to me. Even if my organs decorated the fence, my eyes still worked. And I knew, as I raised them up to the sky, that something was coming for me. Something beyond my comprehension.
    I would swear I saw the clouds part, and those still clinging to life around me moaned as one as the object appeared in the parting. It was a black circle in that perfect sky at first, and then it grew in size as it fell down, down, down, silent in itself but accompanied by the chorus of suffering around me. I cannot tell you how I knew it was coming for me, and me alone, but I knew it. I could see the glint of the sun upon the silvery threads shot through it. I could make out the rough, uneven surface, the jagged bumps, and still it fell, until it filled my vision and the voices around me crescendoed in their fear and pain – and then it landed upon me.
    I would say it did not hurt, but then, physical suffering is hard to recall, I find. I must have felt agony throughout this ordeal, surely? And yet I would swear I felt nothing, and I did not even experience a sensation of collision. Time did seem to stop. There was no time, not in that moment of merging: no time, no gravity, no laws of the natural world that applied. The object fell into the hole that had been made inside of me by that diligent German carpenter, and it filled me. I cried out as the tattered remains of skin and flesh that tied me to the wire were severed. The weight of the rock was immediate; I felt its coldness and heaviness, but I realised instantaneously that I was free, that I could move once more. So I did.
    I pulled myself free, and I walked away.
    I walked for miles, in the grip of nothing worse than a terrible