ABSTRACT
Two attics enriched my childhood in central Wisconsin. My grandfather’s was littered by a pair of football cleats, flowered hats, two round-top wooden and metal trunks, a torn Douay Bible, and the battlefield trophies that my uncles had brought back from France. The second attic was in my aunt Elizabeth’s house, a few blocks up the hill from my grandfather’s. Similar objects lay about that attic, but the prize was a Springfield bolt-action 30/30, complete with bayonet, with which my aunt’s husband had soldiered in Cuba in 1898. My cousin Bob, a year younger than I, would be shepherded down the hill to play with me, and we would make for the attic, which was either baking hot or arctic cold, to put on the gas masks, which smelled of rotting rubber, and one of us would wear the German helmet, a spike on top and a murderous dent on one side. Aided by the illustrated war history in the living room, we formed romantic and approximate notions of trench warfare, which sometimes in good weather we would enact outdoors. Later in Illinois at about age ten, I would organize my neighborhood friends into Americans and Germans, omitting in our patriotic ignorance the French and the British. We dug trenches in an empty building-lot and heaved at one another hand grenades made of sods. Entire Saturdays passed in such warfare, interrupted only by a truce for lunch.
