Sublime

I had written Corps’ for each and every possessive Corps, and the copy editors said that the possessive of Corps should be printed as Corps’s. I thought I was in a morgue. I said so. The copy editors phalanxed—me versus the whole department.

Here is what the message said:

Chatterton smiled and allowed another diver to stay with Kohl for a while. He then moved to the back of the Seeker to help Yurga climb aboard. Still about two hundred feet from the stern of the boat, Yurga waved to Chatterton. Chatterton began to wave back, but his arm froze. Stalking Yurga from behind was an eighteen-foot monster. “Shark!”

Piotr Tarczynkski, a twenty-six-year-old factory clerk, had been ill for some weeks before he was mobilised. But when he informed the commanding officer of his artillery battery that he was ailing, the colonel responded with a brisk patriotic speech, “and told me he was sure that once I found myself in the saddle I would feel much better.”

Three years had taught the sergeant that war was more apt to bring out men’s worst qualities than their finest, but it did occasionally strike little sparks of decency from unlikely flints. Lieutenant Ramos was doing his best.

“Before we left, we thought we were steel. But even those of us who’d deployed before didn’t know what hard was. Not yet. Our platoon sergeant, he had an idea. Kept saying it wouldn’t be like the Invasion, or Afghanistan. That the war had changed, evolved. Kept calling us youngbloods, to try and get us focused. We thought it was a big joke. Ha