text: I lifted my head over the parapet just long enough for it to not be shot off: from the hill I was on, on a beautiful sunny morning, I could see a plain of destruction: of combat, of metal wreckages, and craters, and corpses of young men all twisted up in barbed wire and strewn unnaturally, broken, over tank traps and artillery pieces with blown barrels and smashed wheels. I sat back down and couldn’t bring myself to care today; I had been seeing it over and over, and thinking about the consequences of the war, and couldn’t bring myself to think it was that important that we win. In my trench there was a column of ants running along a horizontal beam and I tried to watch them instead of thinking. I knew an old trick: I spat on my finger and made a line of saliva across the trail of the ant tracks. It stopped the ants when they got there: they walked back and forth along the spit barrier and tried to figure out what was going on, most of them turning around and going back the way they came. I watched one ant heading back, and I realised that every time he came across an ant coming the other way they stopped in front of each other for a moment. I wondered how much information they could exchange with the waving of their antennae: “some asshole’s spit all over our trail.” &#x200B; I heard a shell whistle overhead, glad to hear it pass by without stopping. I couldn’t see the ants carrying anything in either direction: either they had very small bits of food with them or they were doing something else. I wondered what. I wondered if they ever stopped and watched the trail go by and wondered why it was that they did what they did. I knew that they apparently didn’t care about anything but the nest, and that they did their jobs blindly, but was that the limit of their minds? Was there one little corner of the brain, some tiny fragment that hinted at holding something else, even just in one single ant of the colony, a freak occurrence of a tiny thought that wanted to be something more? I wondered how big the piece of me that I felt was so big was, my consciousness or whatever it was, considering I was currently sitting in this trench on this hill, and considering that if someone came up the hill wearing the wrong coloured clothes I would, being honest with myself, shoot him without hesitation. Sure, I did seem to wonder about things pretty frequently-more than ants seem to-but it didn’t seem to be doing me any good, nor had it really ever. I thought back on a painting I had seen, of a sunrise over a harbour and the clamour of construction, a beautiful city being built on a beautiful morning while children raced toy boats in the water. What would that painter, whatever his name was, have done if he was in my position? Could he find any beauty in this scene? &#x200B; The ants kept marching along the beam, surely noticing the way their ground shook when shells exploded nearby. They must have felt it but maybe they had no use for that information: there was certainly nothing they could do about it; and they had things to build, like the labourers in that painting. Did the ants feel as optimistic as that sunrise, as the kids by the cool harbour waters and the busy labourers sweating, while they were doing their part for the anthill? The ants all passed by a weed that had found itself a foothold in the trench wall; it was nice to have something green to look at, but I also knew that it was an edible weed. I plucked it, doing my best not to disturb the ant column as I did so, and chewed it. It didn’t taste like much, but I didn’t really regret plucking it. I took another peek over the parapet, chewing on the fibrous stem of the weed, and everything seemed the same: nothing dramatic was happening, no big attacks were being mounted; it was just a war of attrition built up of tiny blocks of personal tragedy; as those shells that whistled overhead smashed into a trench where someone else was sitting and maybe watching ants. I was glad to not be receiving any orders, or any enemy shells, and I kept on watching the ants.