The submarine blew to smithereens, the contact mine bursting the U-boat’s hull in an instant, breaching all bulkheads to the ravaging green tide that pulverizes the life out of the crew before any could begin to drown, the final man to die a fifteen-year-old seaman in the torpedo room with his eyes wide and pants darkening and scream lost against the killing roar, his hands scrabbling for any hope as the hull collapses around him, the whirling storm of shrapnel stealing his loving face in a riptide of gore spume as the sea crushes his soul into eternity.

[hr]

In dawn’s low bloom, at the south of the Tor Bay, she finds his remains on the beach.

She arrives there at the start of her days to walk the shoreline before work, a small, sharp-edged woman, someone for whom nonsense had taken leave years ago. The tide is her sole companion. Usually.

Her quick, pointed strides along the sand change direction and grow faster as she sees his body. Rushing to his side, she sees the ripped aftermath where his face used to be. The nausea that roils through her has nothing to do with sundered meat. The only thing she can muster to the sight, words heard only by the waves, is, “Another one gone.”

She kneels, touches his head without hesitation, fingers going through his hair to his scalp. Warm palm on ice white.

This moment in sunrise the final time a mother would touch him.

On the hand touching him, there is a paler band of skin around her ring finger. Tombstone to a marriage lost in the aftermath of her apocalypse. Both of her sons dead (dear Christ, how her relationship with that word had changed) since August 23, 1914.

No tears. They come to her every day now. But not here. Drying her hand on her dress, she rises and walks, heading for the village in Churston, where someone with a telephone will contact the old men who will take his corpse away for burial.

[hr]

The war ends three weeks later.

In the dusk of Armistice Day, she sits on the beach alone. Her heart is brimming with a love that has nowhere to go. The tears running down her face serve as fundamental testament.

Her two boys love on, only in memory. She chooses to carry, however imperfectly, a third.

Someone has to.