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8. GAPS – LATER Along the march my ankles began complaining noisily, scraping against the insides of my boots. By about halfway to our destination the murmur of abrasion that had begun as had turned into a wild hissy fit of pain. As it began to really bother me, I ran through the possible culprits, thinking about whether it was grounds to halt myself for inspection and medication or whether it was just a blister coming to a head and being ground down. I hoped for the latter – after some time I was praying for the latter – and yanked along the whining foot like a protesting mongrel on a taut leash. I reassured myself of the latter, but all the while visualized some of the East Prussian mud, possessed of a malicious sentience, stealing inside the wall of my shoe and systematically grinding away at my skin. Against the seamless canvas of the earth and sky I painted Goya-like visions of my skin, a fungal gray after weeks of being in the wet sheath of the boot, coming off in curds as this gritty patina of dirt gnawed at it. I nauseated myself by flipping through my mental portfolio of case histories in gas gangrene on the foot, of suppurating abrasions, of how Big Dieter begged shamelessly, offering everything he had if we would just not take his foot after that Russian wood splinter had gone infected and made it too fat to stand on. I reflected on how the eyes of his friends looked as they calmly forced him, coaxed him, to the aid station. I thought about how my own eyes must have looked. I thought about every manner of disease of the foot, deformity of the foot, injury to the foot, creating an action agenda out of the wordless frustration of my skin’s pain. We stopped on a number of occasions along the way, but on none of these occasions did my condition improve in the slightest. In the first occasion, it was a case of Rodt getting the runs. We all of us have one stomach disorder or another. The Swiss cheese that remains of his bowels launched such an prolonged and br