It doesn’t start with a knife. The burning stick comes first. About a foot long, sharply crooked in the middle, the last three inches or so a glowing red ember. The Tommy holds it like a weapon; there’s  no mistaking it for a gesture of warmth, of trying to bring the heat of the fire to him after a long cold night in the miserable swamp they’d caged him in. He holds it close enough for the ember’s heat to warm his cheek, and then moves it closer until Max can no longer look at it and the warmth becomes pain.

“I can make you ugly,” he says, his voice thick and low. “So ugly the girls will scream and even your father will not want to look at you.”

Max stares at him, meets his eyes. He does not nod, or flinch or show his fear. Being burned does not seem more horrifying than having a noose around his neck. All of this is more than he can face and so levels of terror become irrelevant.

When he doesn’t move, the soldier puts his stick back in the fire to heat.

“You don’t care if you’re ugly? I don’t believe that. The last pretty German boy let me break his fingers, but when I threatened his face he cried. You don’t know what’s important. Hands, you need to work. To make something of yourself. But you are so soft, you think you need your looks.”

He pulls the stick out of the fire again, bringing it towards Max’s left cheek, then shifts trajectory at the last second and pokes it at his right eye. Max wants to jerk back, to drop to the ground, tighten the noose around his neck and escape them once and for all. He wants to keep still, his eyes on the face of this thug and away from the stick, and somehow he gets his wish. The stick comes closer and the smell of burning hair pricks his nose. He feels the terror flare in his eyes, sees the chuckling British soldiers around him  notice, and is relieved that something in them is satisfied by it. They laugh and the man in front of him throws the stick on the fire, where it can’t be retrieved unless he wants to lose the skin on his arm.

Max’s relief is short-lived. The stick is replaced with a knife. A hunting knife with a four or five inch blade, it is designed for close-in work. The man kneels down in front of him, runs the point of the blade down the side of his nose. He grabs Max’s fringe and pulls his head up. “If ugly doesn’t bother you, how about I cut your face right off?”

Max is sure he feels the scrape of metal against the bone of his skull. The blood in his eye feels like hot oil. He flinches then, hard.

‘”No,” he says. Pleads. Using their language. He doesn’t know if it’s the firelight or the wash of blood that makes these men’s teeth gleam red when they grin.

“No. You’re right,” the British soldier says. “It would be a shame to ruin those pretty looks so soon. We have time, I think.”

The man who had been happily carving away at him leaves the circle with a grunt about needing to take a piss and Max realizes he isn’t even sure what rank he holds, who is in charge here? The dark is folding in all around, a lead blanket that confuses all these ugly Anglo faces together. The horizon is lit up with artillery like the dawn – there is still hope isn’t there?

None of the British in this camp seem to be moving. Four English men are watching him from the other side of the fire. He wipes the blood from his eye with his fingers and presses his sleeve to the stinging cut. The seep is warm against his wrist. He is so thirsty that he wonders if there is enough blood for him to drink some.

One of the Englishmen  throws a biscuit into the dirt.

“Eat it,” he says.

“Essen…it,” says another and then bursts into laughter.

At the edges of the campfire he watches a man walk past with a long moustache and all the signs of a Field Marshall plastered to him. Their eyes meet for a moment. The gentleman nods to his men and then keeps walking.

“Here.” Max hears the voice at his ear before his face is pushed down into the mud.  

–

They give him a tin mug of water and a piece of bread with some sort of paste smeared on it. It tastes like blood and dirt.    

The next time they lay out his ration on the ground and piss over it. They don’t make him eat it and he doesn’t.

They shove him into a tent, where the bedding looks like heaven and he collapses on top of it without a struggle.

–

When he wakes someone is pulling his trousers down without undoing them. Five days with little water and less food mean that even the button stays intact.

He concentrates on the feel of the pillow under his face as fingers are dug into his hips, lifting him, and ripping into him with no further warning than that. He doesn’t cry out until a calloused hand pulls his dislocated elbow up behind his back. The nauseous, intense agony of it forces him back into his body; each thrust pushes tears of pain to his eyes, his hands hurt where they grip so tightly into fists.    

The British soldier grunts when he comes, hot, heavy breath against Max’s ear as he thrusts his dick into him as far as it will go. He can’t feel it but he knows he’s being bred like a woman. The clammy breath against his ear mirrors the awful stickiness that leaks out between his thighs as the cock inside him withdraws.

–

The next time Max wakes, he’s tied to a tree by his ankle like a stray dog. He hardly has time to wonder why his hands aren’t tied before he sees the man on an ammunition crate stool pointing a rifle at his head from less than five feet away. Suddenly even the ankle-leash seems overkill.

These British boys like to visit his tree. They ask him questions in a language he doesn’t quite understand. After a while, starving, it doesn’t even sound like human language at all.  

–

He’s dancing in the dark, eyes fixed on the cold grey horizon, trying not to move too much so he doesn’t rub his wrists raw. Someone pulls him up by his collar, pries his mouth open, and with a rifle-toting guard laughing, pushes his filthy cock past his lips and down his throat.

Max doesn’t mean to bite him. It’s a reflex, like retching.  

They cut the rope tying him to the tree and between them they carry him closer to the fire. They lash him on his side, facing the crackling logs so he can’t roll away when they kick him, and so every kick has the threat of immolation as a counterpoint. Unconsciousness feels like death.

When the next Tommy fucks his face with a pistol, he says, “This time if you bite it breaks your teeth.” Every time.

–

The spoon holds something that looks like porridge.  

The ropes around his arms and chest that tie him to the stake prevent him from feeding himself, but the English occasionally shove bits of bread in his mouth, pouring water after it, leaving him to figure out how to chew and swallow without choking.  

This is not just oats and water, but milk and sugar and salt. The taste of something like real food is something amazing and Max almost cries with the pleasure of it. When he’s offered a second spoonful, he opens his mouth eagerly.  

The man feeding him tips the food to the ground and pushes the empty spoon over his tongue and down his throat, holding it there, his face impassive, as Max gags and gasps, then thrashes. The world begins to grey from lack of oxygen.

“You eat like a pig,” he says. “You don’t deserve food.”