I am presently lost in thought, the sunrise beaming through Otto’s violet drapes onto my face makes me slothful. I am in Tulle again, returning home with mom and dad to the Duval house. There is a shadow over this place. The walls of my old room press on me like a sarcophagus - I couldn’t stand it. I slept in Otto’s bed, or tried to. I rose before the sun and now sit at his window sill overlooking the eastern field. There is a crater there, carved out of the dead rows where the summer’s harvest had been burned away. Otto never wrote about why he joined, not in specifics, anyway. I don’t imagine he felt happy talking about it, but it’s too little a wound to worry now. Step in if you’d like me to stop, little one.

I’ll go on. A week after the war began we two sat on the porch, listening to the blue birds twittering on the trees and talking of something innocuous - some music Otto had heard, I think - when a low rumble began above us. I can tell you honestly that I have heard absolutely nothing like it in my entire life. Having no guess as to the sound’s origin, I turned to Otto, whose face told me all I needed to know. This was something new. We had seen automobiles before, but no road leading anywhere near our farmhouse could support one, and either way we knew this was no automobile. The rumbling seemed to be coming from above and behind the house, the same place we might have heard a songbird flying over us, yet it was no songbird. I stood from my rocking chair in disbelief, tilting an ear to the sky so I might understand what might be happening. This was a grave mistake. The rumbling grew nearer, and nearer, and stronger until the porch beneath us shook with the vibration, the sound growing steadily in pitch as it approached. Before I could stop him, Otto took off into our eastern field, which was green with growing then, and I took off after him. We hadn’t yet had a chance to turn around to investigate when the sound, climbing, became so terrible, so monumental that I was forced to cover my ears, and Otto fell to his knees in pain before me, covering his own. Above his head, about fifty feet above the ground, I saw a flaming corpse of a machine flying - falling - steeply downward. A hundred meters ahead of Otto, almost exactly in the middle of the field, the machine crashed in a fiery inferno upon the ground, producing a shockwave of sound which still has left a ringing in my ears. The entire field burned that day, for what was there to stop it? We could account for acts of God, but a flying machine? I’d never heard of such a thing before.

I was told by an officer of the British army who came with a team to retrieve the wreckage the following day that the machine was called an aeroplane, and was being used as an experimental form of reconnaissance. During its maiden voyage its engine combusted directly over the western front near the French-Belgian border. Disoriented, the man inside searched for the base he’d taken off from but he couldn’t find it in time. In his dazed state he managed to fly 700 kilometers southwest to Tulle, where, having no fuel left, he crashed into our field.

Otto was horribly affected by the aeroplane crash, so much so that he lied about his age to join the war effort. He was 17. He said I was 30 in his entries, I believe, in order to further sell the lie, though I am 25. His entries are littered with small details like this, things which make it difficult to believe some of what is written here, though I’ve tried my best to sort the truth from the lies. It’s a form of self-protection I can appreciate, but not one I’ll be quick to repeat. He made a point of mentioning my military service and my reluctance for joining with him, and this much is true. My service gave me enough experience not to enlist, though the real reason - as is so often true - is much more complicated than what he said. The army does strange things to a man, the kind of things that ought to be allowed to him as secrets. No, I will not rejoin, even now. My destiny will be the same as France’s. Have humans yet found a process by which we can see the future? And what of changing the past? As sure as I am that we haven't, I see no reason in contemplating the repercussions of my not enlisting, though the thought now comes to my head: how could it have been different? If I had gone with him, could I have stopped him? There is no way to tell, and clinging to this question is no way to live.