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The Light Brigade crashed into the Russian army like a sledge hammer into an anvil.

The enemy troops were taken by surprise, unable to believe that this gnat of an opposing force would attack them. Russian gunfire rang out. Cannons blasted, and invading infantry troops marched toward the British horsemen.

The acrid smell of black powder and raw blood filled the air, mingled with dust from explosions. The scattered troops stumbled onto leftover landmines, which exploded, harming both sides. A sleet storm of lead bullets rained down. British brigadiers began falling like stalks of wheat under a scythe.

Nemo saw the brash young officer beside him thrown from his horse, a red wound in his throat. Nemo could barely hold on to his own charging horse, which had been a mere riding animal, not a trained war mount. The clash and thunder of war deafened him, crushing his terror, crushing thought itself.

British and French reinforcements were approaching. From a distance, their cannons fired -- but they were too far away and traveling too slowly. Much too slowly.

The Russians continued to fire upon the Light Brigade as if for sport. Few of their own number died, but the Light Brigade riders, blindly following Earl Cardigan to a slaughter, fell one after another after another.

Something slammed into Nemo’s lower left rib cage with the force of a club, and he clung to the reins of his horse. He couldn’t breathe. His vision turned dark for a moment, filled with clouds.

He touched his side to find a heavy flow of blood seeping from a burned hole in his jacket. His horse ran in blind panic.

A cannon blast erupted at ground-level beside him. Nemo tried to hold onto the saddle and reins, but his fingers had turned to water. The world spun around him. More blood stained his hands and his chest. Soon all of his vision turned the same color of red, then black.

By the time he dropped onto the churned and war-torn battlefield, he couldn’t even feel his body strike the ground.

iv

When Nemo awoke from a crimson haze of pain, he smelled blood and chemicals and sharp tobacco smoke. He instantly tried to assess his surroundings, to snatch at recent recollection that fled like the tattered remnants of dreams. He heard the moans of injured men, the snores of the blissfully unconscious, the deep silence of the comatose. The uncertain light around him seemed grimy, tainted with shadows.

Nemo gradually understood that he was no longer on the battlefield, but inside a building that must be an army hospital. He lay without sheets on a pallet made of hard wood. Only a little starlight seeped through the narrow windows that lined the walls.

He reached out with stiff fingers, following the nerve lines to sketch the extent of his pain. His left side was bandaged with ragged swaths of red-stained cloth. After touching the soaked and crusted dressing, he determined that he must have been here for at least a full day. The smells of vomit, urine, and blood made the close air as fetid as the oppressive marshes around Lake Tchad.

The large room held only a few actual beds occupied by wounded soldiers, some so bandaged that they looked mummified. Other injured men lay on the bare floor without even a pallet like his own. A few groaned and stirred in the restless night; others huddled in a pain-fogged sleep. Some did not move at all, unconscious . . . or perhaps dead and not yet taken away.

Lying motionless, Nemo reached out with his precise memories of the landscape and soon determined where he must be. He recalled a huge old Turkish barracks outside of Sevastopol, unfurnished and dirty. Considering the crowded conditions, the hospital must be full of casualties. He wondered how many of those brave but foolish British cavalrymen had survived Cardigan’s ill-advised attack. The ineptitude of the commanders and the blind compliance of the Light Brigade made him distraught.

The war, the suffering, the sheer waste disgusted him. How could he ever have wanted to come here? How could a battleground ever seem preferable to Paris, even with the