Lark’s Lake

	When the replacement arrived, we wished they were replacing us too. They weren’t, and the replacement, General Coates, had no intention of letting us mourn any longer. Our allotted time for mourning expired long ago.  He arrived in an armored jeep, trekking in from wherever generals come from, with two lesser jeeps ahead of him and behind him.  On them were white letters spattered in mud, blending in with the camouflage,  and on the front of each jeep perched two round lights, on in the daylight, peering out.
	Lark flashed me an awkward glance, and when I looked towards him he drowned the awkwardness in a knowing nod.  The new one’s here, just like he expected.

	General Cots died in combat, and at the service, we were all sitting on logs to see, not necessarily to hear.  The chaplain’s words were hollow as he read them, but his face and motions were reassuring even when he seemed confused.  That’s probably why they chose him as chaplain, Lark had suggested. The chaplain’s face was round, gentle, and curving—far more solace than his religion, which he was dodgy with in any case.
	Lark jabbed my rib with his elbow.  “He’s just reading, see? And what he’s saying doesn’t even make sense. Listen,” he half-whispered.  I wasn’t listening to the chaplain and nor was anyone else as far as I could tell, but I nodded.
	He fed off my nod and said, louder, “I bet they didn’t even intend for him to use this part of his book.  It’s not in line with the normal stuff at all.  Listen to that, ‘Let us be reminded of our own frail mortality,’ or something.  They’re supposed to make us feel invincible, I thought!” I nodded vigorously, trying to signal an end to the conversation.  “‘For so too as the Son of Man died for three days upon the cross, so our beloved General Cots’” he repeated from the chaplain.  Then, “That’s more like it!” 
	He might have said more, but I was watching the chaplain, himself confused at the words he read from the pages that were in mint condition.
	Private Lark was not a charlatan, although he acted it.  Most of what he said in his know-it-all tone was probably actually true, and if you denounced him as a quack he would inform you of how little he really knew, and how the only true knowledge one can know is that one knows nothing, and that he was always surprised by the smartness of people around him, and other such things.  But although he could easily pass as an annoying bighead made of nothing but acidic cynicism, he wasn’t like that all the time. When marching down dusty trails composed of two bands from vehicles’ wheels, he would gaze longingly through impenetrable trees, where he saw his lake.  That’s where we were marching, always, and sometimes we pretended to look forward with him to that lake’s shimmering side. Sometimes we even saw it. General Cots chuckled at it, and praised Lark for his creative ways of raising morale. Lark contended that he was not creative but was reporting what he really saw, and this angered General Cots.
	“Look, I appreciate what you’re doing, but I’m the General here. You don’t have to be fake to me. Got it, Private?” he would say.
	“But I’m not being fake. It’s real. Can’t you see it? The lake has birds sometimes. You can see their reflections, but never them. See? Over to your left, Sir.”
	“Don’t talk back to me, Private. Keep it up.”
	Even now, as he had stopped jabbering, I could see him swivel on his log to face aside, looking for his clear lake.
	The chaplain resorted to waving his arms about to allay his appearance of confusion, not realizing that we related better with confusion than certainty. Certainty would probably have made us feel jealous at best. Some uniforms in front of me shifted uncomfortably at the chaplain’s change of act.
	Generals were like gods. They couldn’t die, and the notion of that would have been completely absurd. The days of generals on the battlefield were over, and the mindset stuck even though our battalion was one of one that actually had a resident general. He never really took an active interest in us, but his presence counted for something. Generals are always on the news, or in lounges hunched over maps, pointing here and saying march here blah blah. 
	But General Cots would do that from his tent, and you could hear him saying it, and he was real. If you disagreed you could theoretically kill him right there, and he would die. But you didn’t. I used to think about killing him a lot, when we first set out. I could hear his eating from miles away and it drove me to the point of insanity, but I soon realized that he was the General, so I couldn’t kill him. 
	Lark once told me that he was here because we were the least active battalion, so they could risk putting him here. Now I haven’t heard much about how active the other battalions are, but we’re not inactive. I think they put him with us randomly, but I think they put him with a battalion in general for morale or something like that. I told that to Lark and he nodded and said “Of course! But now he’s dead, and we’ll see what morale that gives us.”
	“Let us not go astray without the guidance of our General Cots, and let us cherish him and his fair memory while our replacement for him arrives swiftly,” forced the chaplain. 

	As the sun set between the pine trees that evening, raised voices wafted down from the colonels’ tents. Colonel Dredson was arguing with Colonel Wilson over who should take control of the battalion in Cots’s absence. Dredson had been appointed colonel and second-in-command by the army before we had left, but Wilson had been appointed as such by Cots of his own accord, and the clear successor was not evident. 
	I sneaked over next to their tents to hear, hiding behind a line of trees. 
	“I was appointed by the military as a whole, and that outweighs Cots,” said Dredson, his voice punctuated with little pops as he pounded his chest.
	“But Cots knew the situation in the field better than the military intelligence, being there, and so he knew better who should be in charge if he died,” replied Wilson. The argument continued almost exactly like this for a good thirty minutes, back and forth, with voices raising and falling and Dredson punching his chest ever harder, before Wilson began to falter. 
	“We need to think of the men,” he began.
	“Damn right we do! And an upstart like you isn’t going to raise morale!” retorted Dredson.
	“In all frankness, sir, hitting your chest isn’t going to help either.”
	“And what do you know about it? Just because you wiped Cots’s ass for him you know all about this, boy?”
	“No, but I used to be with them, so I know, but you weren’t,” he stammered out.
	“Dammit! Why did he do this? He didn’t really need a second in command, so he thought it would be funny to appoint a little snivel like you.  Even the little guys can be colonels too, that’s what he thought they would think. But you know what, Wilson? You’ll never be like him. You’ll never be anything, Cots’s neat little ideas be damned.”
	
	As I walked back to my tent from the Colonels’, I whistled to myself some song by Mozart. Colonel Wilson was probably going to be court-martialed for that argument if Dredson had his way, and I couldn’t say I was really sad about that. Wilson had been stuck-up to me forever.
	Even if he wasn’t court-martialed, Wilson would probably be demoted down to being with the rest of us. Again. His delusions of being a colonel had fallen apart when Cots died.
	Soon I passed by Lark’s tent. He was leaning on the log that supported it, whistling.
	“Hey Wilhelm!” he called, unfolding his uniformed arms, “did you hear that screaming? Over by the colonels’ tents? I bet they were fighting over who would be in command. I expected it.”
	“Yeah, I was just over there,” I replied, stopping.
	“They’re going to argue about it until a replacement comes,” he said, “Less walking. No problem.”
	I motioned to continue walking on, but he stopped me. “Wait, I want to show you something.” He led me behind his tent to the point where trees terminated the camp in a sudden wall. Then he lifted his left arm in a flourish and held it toward the curtain of darkness between the trees, trunks sighing in the moonlight.
	“Look, through the trees,” he said, “you can see the lake. We’re going there soon, you know? Look, there’s birds. Flamingos. They’re pretty in the sunset, don’t you think, Wilhelm?”
	Beyond the first line of trees there was only black, not even other trees could be seen. But I wanted to see, and maybe for a moment I did, the sparkling orange waters under the watchful setting sun, guarding its flock of flying birds, melting into the water. “I do see,” I said, and it almost sounded real. “It’s wonderful. Really.”
	“Good,” said Lark, “I’m glad you saw that.”
	I heard raised voices again from the colonels’ tent and asked Lark if he wanted to go over and listen. He declined, condescending, already knowing what was going on.

	When I returned from eavesdropping, I saw Lark sitting on a wide tent-stake with his face in his hands. “It’s not real,” he said when I asked, shaking his head, “the lake, I made it up. I never saw it; I just wanted to look happy. It’s not real, and now it’s gone.”
	“Where did it go?” I asked.
	“It wasn’t ever there! You all just pretended to see it. You don’t have to humor me. General Cots didn’t.”
	“General Cots is dead.”
	“Really! How astute of you, Wilhelm! Tell me, Wilhelm, with your astounding skills of observation, have you ever seen my lake?” Now Lark looked me in the face.
	“I saw it. No, I wanted to. I think I did,” I stammered.
	“No, you never saw it. You just played along. Cots was the only real thing in this damn place! Now, are you going to be real, Private Wilhelm?” Now he was sneering.
	
	We had battles rarely, but still at a good, constant rate. That time, the enemy was using the same road as we were, and although soldiers on both sides seemed perfectly OK with just ignoring each other, General Cots found it necessary to engage them in battle. The troops on each side rushed at each other while angling into the forest on each side of the road, forming an oval devoid of people in the center. General Cots stepped in there, and he tripped and fell to the ground. Then a soldier from one side or the other dropped his pack on him, and muddy boots trod on his face. When the skirmish was over, he was buried up to his chest in mud, his head in the ground like an ostrich, and when we pulled it out we found it stripped of skin and life. We don’t know to this day whether he was dead then or not, but we assumed not, and rushed him back away from the retreating enemy to resuscitate him. But by the time we reached where we had dropped our first-aid supplies, he was gone.