Today I bought Her Majesty The Decem­berists on vinyl, and although it wasn’t one of the 500 or so red copies that were pressed, it did come with a story absent from the CD’s liner notes:

Since both Charles and Henry were typ­i­cally light sleep­ers and had enjoyed stay­ing up long past the pla­toon sergeant had announced lights out, they were both delighted to find that the reg­u­lar evening mor­tar blitz by the Teu­tons sup­plied ample light for them both to peruse their beloved vol­umes of clas­sic and con­tem­po­rary drama long after their kerosene lamps has been extin­guished. Once the bar­rage had begun, they would crawl from their fox hole and inch their way up the side of the trench so as to most ben­e­fit from the bombardment’s extra­or­di­nary, if some­what incon­sis­tent, lumi­nes­cence. A flash of light, a deaf­en­ing explo­sion, and the protagonist’s final solil­o­quy would be revealed to Henry, who read the sub­se­quent pas­sages as fast as he could so as to make use of the fleet­ing light, which would inevitably fal­ter just as the crux of the mono­logue came to bear. In nor­mal cir­cum­stances, he would have been annoyed at the incon­sis­tency of his read­ing light, but in this sit­u­a­tion he began to appre­ci­ate the environment’s pecu­liar­i­ties and actu­ally rel­ished the interim pro­vided him by the mor­tars’ respite to con­tem­plate the grav­ity of the text. The two com­rades’ evening read­ing habit devel­oped to a point where they began to act out the dia­logue of the plays they were read­ing, the trench wall their prosce­nium, the dis­tant explo­sions their stage light­ing. On one such evening, as the rest of the pla­tooon lay qui­etly in their ham­mocks, Charles and Henry took to the trench wall to read to one another the dia­logue between the ill-fated lovers Tris­tan and Isolde. Charles played the maiden, a mag­a­zine of machine gun car­tridges arrayed over his brow to affect Isolde’s golden tresses. Henry, as Tris­tan, leaned against his rifle as he pre­pared for his final, tragic mono­logue. Sud­denly, the Kaisers launched a sur­prise attack, and the hori­zon was ablaze with mor­tar blasts and can­non fire. The trenches erupted into activ­ity, but Charles and Henry, engrossed in their drama, only fell deeper under the spell of the play. The bar­rage grew stronger in inten­sity, and the duo felt no want for read­ing light as they reached the third act of the tragedy. Henry, feign­ing a blow from his neme­sis Mark (played here by a large, barbed-wire tan­gled post) fell to the mud and began to lament his fate, paus­ing only to squint at his lines as writ­ten in the slim vol­ume he held in his soiled hands. Charles, his whole being lost to the drama, edged closer to his fatally wounded lover and began to softly intone his last lines when a piece of shrap­nel exploded from a nearby shell and lodged itself deep in his heart. He careened, fal­tered, fell upon the body of Henry, and, with his last scripted words spo­ken in a del­i­cate whis­per, he died. Henry, much moved, cau­tiously opened one eye (so as not to dis­turb the verisimil­i­tude of the divine moment) and peered at his fallen comrade.

“Charles?” said Henry.

Over­head, a new vol­ley of mor­tar fire erupted in a pageant of fire­works, rain­ing a shower of sparks and light over the two fig­ures hud­dled on the trench wall.