by Bryan Young
“What’s the use?” he asked me.
“Just in case.” I told him.
Gathering the cards into a pile as neat as could be, I tossed them into the wastebasket.
“Do you have a match?” I asked LeBeau.
He said nothing, but I knew his mind.
“I promise I won’t burn us all to hell. It’s these. Just these. It’s only ever been these.”
“Oui,” he relented.
LeBeau searched through his pockets, looking for his matchbox. When he finally found it, he struck his match against the rough strip on the box and I held one of the punch cards, bloodied by my grip, over the match, enveloping it in flame. It brightened the candlelight in the room, casting harsh flashes of light over the both of us before I laid the card down and set fire to the rest of the data cards. Cards that would create a new technology that would cause the same heartbreak in thousands more across the world on both sides of this conflict.
It was hard to think these disparate punches on cards would lead to a rocket that would fire a gun across thousands of miles and borders. Or let them fly over trenches. Or to the moon. It didn’t matter.
No one deserved to know how to deal death from such a distance.
Though I couldn’t stop all the sacrifices like the one Sara had made, this small act of rebellion would save some. Wouldn’t it? The French said they’d end the war with the technology, so did the Germans, but I didn’t believe either of them. They had no care for us.
The fire before us would be a better and more respectable way to honor Sara’s memory than the indelible image of the life being choked out of the American spy.
“Qu’est-ce que tu fais? What are you doing?” LeBeau asked me, his face a sputtering orange in the growing firelight.
“They call this the war to end all wars,” I said, my eyes blurred through with tears. “Well let’s bloody well hope so.”