“Shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake,Out in the trench with three hours' watch to take,I blunder through the splashing mirk; and thenHear the gruff muttering voices of the menCrouching in cabins candle-chinked with light.Hark! There's the big bombardment on our rightRumbling and bumping; and the dark's a glareOf flickering horror in the sectors whereWe raid the Boche; men waiting, stiff and chilled,Or crawling on their bellies through the wire."What? Stretcher-bearers wanted? Some one killed?"Five minutes ago I heard a sniper fire:Why did he do it?... Starlight overhead--Blank stars. I'm wide-awake; and some chap's dead.”

“You’d always shine through,” he muttered and now he sounded sleepy but I was again wide awake. “Somethin’ special,” he finished.”

“I don't sleep. All night long I'm wide awake, thinking, Secrets, secrets, secrets. There are secrets in my past no one needs to know. Secrets in my present that might kill Kim and Chip. I don't want to take my secrets with me when I go. When I pass through the light, i want to be free of everything and everyone.”

“Because, really, what was worse than lying wide-awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another?”

“Sometimes I wait at the bottom of those dark stairs, I sit at the bottom of the stairs, I wait beyond the bottom of the stairs and listen to the sounds my wife and children make as they sleep, the sounds our animals make as they step carefully through our dreams and out the other side to polished floor and cold window. Sometimes I wait so long I become unsure if I am asleep, or awake, or dead.”

“I lay awake for hours and watched you sleep," he murmurs. "I might have loved you even then.”