Herbert West, Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft.

Red by Mike Bennett.

Part 5, The Horror From the Shadows.

Many men have related hideous things not mentioned in print which happened on the battlefields of the great war.

Some of these things have made me faint, others have convulsed me with devastating nausea,

while still others have made me tremble and look behind me in the dark. Yet despite the worst of them, I believe

I can myself relate the most hideous thing of all. The shocking, the unnatural, the unbelievable horror from

the shadows. In 1915 I was a physician with the rank of First Lieutenant in a Canadian regiment in

Flanders, one of many Americans to proceed the government itself into the gigantic struggle.

I had not entered the army on my own initiative,

but rather as a natural result of the enlistment of the man whose indispensable assistant I was, the celebrated Boston

surgical specialist Dr Herbert West.

Dr West had been avid for a chance to Dr. me with him almost against my will. There were reasons why I would have been glad to let

the war separate us, reasons why I found the practice of medicine and the companionship of West, more and more irritating. But when he had gone to Ottawa and through a colleague's influence secured a medical commission as major, I could not resist the imperious persuasion of one

determined that I should accompany him in my usual capacity.

When I say that Dr West was avid to serve in battle, I do not mean to imply that he was

either naturally warlike or anxious for the safety of civilization.

Always an ice-cold intellectual machine,

slight, blonde, blue-eyed and spectacled.

I think he secretly sneered at my occasional martial

enthusiasms and censures of supine neutrality. There was however something he wanted in embattled Flanders, and in order to secure it he had

to assume a military exterior.

...