with no identification, unrecognizable.

“You should be trying to trick me,” the burned pilot told his interrogators, “make me speak German, which I can, by the way,  Ask me about Marmite, the great Gertrude Jekyll.

The sea hospital was created out of bathing cabins along the beach that tourists had rented at the turn of the century. The burned man noticed the young nurse, separate from the others. He was familiar with such dead glances, knew she was more patient than nurse.He was interrogated again. Everything about him was very English except for the fact that his skin was tarred black, a bogman from history among the interrogating officers.

They asked him where the Allies stood in Italy, and he said he assumed they had taken Florence but were held up by the hill towns north of them.He had rambled on, driving them mad, traitor or ally, leaving them never quite sure who he was. 

Now, months later in the Villa San Girolamo,in the arbour room that is his bedroom, he reposes like the sculpture of the dead knight in Ravenna. in the arbour room that is his bedroom, he reposes like the sculpture of the dead knight in Ravenna. And in his commonplace book, his 1890 edition of Herodotus’ Histories, are other fragments.