The Tin Toy Soldiers Of Guy Monnier
‘Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.’—H. P. Lovecraft
Amongst the various tales I recount of preternatural origin, there is one in particular that has fascinated the minds of curious readers. It is a distinct tale of unspeakable horror that began within the familiar setting of Toulouse, in the year 1928.
The name of the individual I shall now introduce is Guy Monnier, a former French soldier of the Great War. Perhaps his name is irrelevant to you, but his incredible story is not mere fiction to be dismissed as a foolish act of aberration. I know that within the world of the living, the dead do roam the Earth in eternal ubiquity, as is evident in the case of our uninvited guests whom you will soon meet in this story.
Indeed, I admit that I was a sceptic before, until I encountered the wandering souls of the dead, who are concealed in the world we occupy as mortals. It is a world of a portentous nature that has evolved into the endless myths and legends that have endured in folklore for innumerable centuries.
The day began with the morning sun reaching the window of the residence of Guy Monnier, shining brightly in the French summer. He was in the patio, absorbing the rays of the sun to enliven his pale complexion and taking his casual morning stroll when I visited him that Monday.
He was glad to see me and to converse about his interesting theories on an array of topics, including science and politics. My patient was an intellectual man of medium stature, but he spoke little of his soldiering days. The Great War was a delicate topic about which he did not wish to expound many details.
This was manifest in his eyes and demeanour, which I detected conscientiously. Guy had an obvious limp that was noticeable in his gait as he walked. It was attributed to a bullet wound he had suffered in the horrid trenches of the Ardennes region of France.
I had first met him a year ago, when he was returning to Toulouse from the war. He had been experiencing serious effects of delusions and anxiety when he became my patient. His previous doctor had declared in his report that Monnier had become an addict and that his progress was slow. I was a reputable doctor by profession, named Olivier Joubert. I had been treating him for his ongoing addiction to morphine and opium.
His terrible addiction was common amongst soldiers of war, and his continuous dependency on the drug was no different from that of other men of the battlefield. The undesirable tendencies of war had left behind a consequential effect not easily forgotten nor effaced by the written pages of history. He was in a jovial manner and expressed a desire to visit Paris, since the war had ended. He requested that I accompany him on that trip, and I gave him my solemn word. It had been several years since he had left his home or travelled outside of Toulouse.
Because I had business to attend to in Paris, I agreed to take him with me. I could not refuse his admirable petition to regain his vim and vigour anew. After all, I had seen my patient languish in the profound depths of the abyss constantly. I told him we would visit Paris in a week and that I had a house there.
Meanwhile, he waited in great anticipation of the trip and was excited to travel. I was not certain what had caused this desire to see Paris, but I expected he would enjoy it as a welcome distraction. The war had occupied his conflictive thoughts and emotions consistently. His reintegration into society was my main concern at the time, and the city of Paris was an idyllic setting. I had been treating other patients who were former soldiers of that despicable war, and I had seen the tremendous scars inflicted upon them afterwards.
On the day of the trip, my automobile stopped to collect Monnier to take him to the railway station, where I was waiting for him. We arrived in Paris at midday, and the rapid bustle of the city was heard throughout the rampant Parisian streets. Monnier wished to see the Tour Eiffel and then the Place de la Concorde, and I agreed.
We visited an art gallery and went to the theatre, where we saw the recent version of the comedy play La Vertu de ma femme by Pierre Berton that evening. I could not recall seeing him so excited at every place we visited.
The trip to Paris had reanimated his enervated and frail constitution, which reflected his previously dejected mood. The placidity reflected in his countenance would only be a brief expression, but it was an immediate token of satisfaction for me. Monnier was content, and as his head doctor, this was sufficient cause for me to take notice of this fortuitous change that had been absent before.
Paris was the temporary remedy to his anguish and despair. My hope was that in Toulouse, he could find a measure of mental stability. Thereafter, we returned to the house to retire for the night. During the late hours, Monnier began to experience a horrific nightmare that awoke me with his loud screams.
When I arrived at his chamber, he was drenched in heavy perspiration and shaking, within uncontrollable chills that startled me to the core of my perception. Quickly, I subdued his dreadful episode with an injection of morphine. Although he was addicted to morphine, this was the only viable way to prevent a serious convulsion. The injection eventually reduced his unsettling episode of fear.
It was sufficient to allow him to sleep for the rest of the night and early hours of the morning, relatively calmly. This was the first time I had witnessed these unparalleled phantasmagorias with Monnier. I had seen such incidents with other patients. My research on the topic was extensive and punctilious.
France was plagued with numerous cases of this nature ever since the cessation of the war in 1919. The internal scars were more profound than the external ones, and I had to deal with those visible scars daily in my profession as a medic.
In the morning, I noted his recovery, and we went to the main streets in central Paris to browse the stores and other well-known establishments. Monnier was enamoured with the colourful glamour of the city.
We passed a toy shop on the corner of the Rue de Rivoli, where he saw something familiar: a set of tin toy soldiers of the French Foreign Legion. He told me that his father had once bought him an entire set of tin toy soldiers as a gift when he was a small child.
He wanted to purchase them; for what reason, I did not know. He had never shown me any discrete fondness for any object unrelated to art. Anything connected to war, I had assumed, was an odious reminder of his ghastly ordeal spent in the trenches of warfare. His precise motive for purchasing these soldiers was purely nostalgic in essence.
There was something of sentimental value in these remarkable tin pieces, which characterised the valour of many fallen and forgotten soldiers. I believe they reminded him of his comrades on the battlefield, who had fought and bled with him during intense battles.
I attempted to use psychology to comprehend his reaction and his attraction to the tin toy soldiers. What would compel a grown man to be drawn so passionately to an iconic symbol representing death and destruction? Perhaps it was the image of the courageous soldier in uniform, with his Lebel rifle at hand and Adrian helmet, that intrigued his heightened interest. I did not insist on knowing the inducement and desisted from further questions.
After we left the store, we returned to my home and prepared for the long railway journey back to Toulouse. During the trip, we had an engaging discourse at length about our magnificent time in Paris. I perceived that the time spent there was therapeutic for his mind and body. He had been struggling since the end of the war with his habitual addiction, and I was satisfied to see him distracted from this major problem.
When we arrived the next day in the afternoon, we resumed our daily lives. Monnier returned to his home, whilst I returned to my ample duties as a doctor at La Grave Hospital in the city. Many patients there were either poor beggars or injured and disabled former soldiers of the war. Historically, it had been the centre for the treatment of plague victims in the 15th and 16th centuries.
I did not see Monnier for about a week. When I did, it was exactly in front of my hospital, situated in the Saint-Cyprien quartier. He was not in fine fettle, and he demonstrated a disconcerting disquietude expressed on his visage, plain to see.
His speech was not coherent, and he mumbled an utterance of words that I failed to understand. I observed evident symptoms of hysterics in his conduct, and these signs troubled me instantly. I managed to appease his anxiety and took him inside to examine and sedate him.
Once inside, in my consulting room, I sat him down and discussed with him what had caused his sudden burst of apprehension. What he disclosed to me was of an inconceivable nature. According to Monnier, he was being tormented not by any living soul, but by the dead souls of his companions, who had died and entered the tin toy soldiers he had collected. Naturally, I was flabbergasted and did not believe his account at all.
Perhaps I had misheard or misunderstood his disjointed words. Thus, I asked him to repeat what he had divulged to me before my question. He proceeded to repeat his story, and this time, he was even more revealing in his version. I remember so vividly the expression in his eyes and mouth as he insisted on describing his ineffable horror. He was very convincing in his affirmation, but it could not be reasonable or credible, as it was irrational. The sedative began to take effect and allowed me to contemplate the real problem that was affecting Guy Monnier.
I arranged for a taxi to escort him home and informed him that I would visit him in the morning as soon as I could. He confided then in my words of assurance and assistance. Until I examined and spoke to him further, I could not make a proper prognosis at that time, but his impractical story seemed to be a definite sign of some experimental hallucinations of an undetermined derivation. My immediate suspicion of his frantic episode would have to be confirmed during my next visit to his residence.
When I visited him that day, he was in his private library, standing before the window, staring off into the sky, as I addressed him. When he turned around, he presented himself with a horrendous indisposition and aspect. He was fretting and had the urgency to talk to me at once. I presumed he wanted to explain what had been occurring to him so mysteriously.
I was correct in my assumption, and he began to relate his unimaginative story of the tin toy soldiers coming to life. As I listened to him speak, his circumspect guise reflected his harsh torment. His expression was not what preoccupied me; rather, it was his state of mind. I listened to him tell me that every night he would hear the boisterous sounds of the soldiers marching together simultaneously and could see their daunting movement in action.
My main concern then was maintaining his necessary sanity, protecting him from the delusions that were haunting him. Could these episodes be connected to the lamentable anguish that had burdened him since the war? Afterwards, I attempted to grasp his mindset and determine the best method I could apply effectively. The analytical approach seemed better to utilise in his case.
Therefore, I preferred to deal with his incidents with the tin toy soldiers as obvious symptoms of the hallucinations he was experiencing. How much of his addiction was to blame? The origin of this distress was important to resolve if I was to restore his mental faculties. His unstable behaviour could be controlled with medication, but that was not a final solution to his real problem. What he needed was rest and tranquillity, amidst his nightly aversion.
I told him that I would return to see him tomorrow after I had finished with an appointment at the hospital. This was enough to calm him down and help him cope with his nocturnal fright. At the hospital, I pondered the case of Guy Monnier and the cause behind his mental aberrations. The consequence was of a discomfiting nature, and the outcome was predictable—his certain death or madness.
I was not even confident that I could cure him or restore his debilitated mind. That would require the extraordinary process of deep retrospection and exploration. The undeniable hallucinatory episodes of Monnier were present and a constant manifestation of his hysterics, at an invariable degree of incongruity. I had studied countless methods of treatment for mental patients, including shock treatments, but I was against that primitive form of subversion.
I was not an exponent of that theory. If only I could pinpoint the exact episode in his past that had evoked this trepidation in him, I would be able to assume a more practical and effective solution. I calculated that any successful treatment applied would take months, if not years, along with the need for careful sedulity.
The plentiful scars of war were extremely difficult to analyse, as they were not only external but internal in their unique comparison. Monnier was exhibiting the internal affliction of surviving the brutality of war. Were these aberrations merely a pretext for his denial of the truth?
'It was Verdun', he would mutter, staring into the flames. “We were pinned down for days, shells screaming overhead…Antoine was next to me when the blast hit. I—I can still see his face, frozen in shock. And when I looked down at my feet…” He trailed off, visibly trembling. “They were there. The soldiers. Not men…toys. Tiny metal soldiers crawling out of the mud, climbing over the corpses, bayonets glinting. I thought it was shock. Madness. But they followed me home. They’ve always followed me'.
His breathing grew ragged, and he grasped my arm with sudden desperation. 'You don’t understand. I brought them back from hell'.
The weight of his words settled around us, thick and suffocating. In that moment, I saw not merely a madman but a man shattered by horrors both real and—perhaps—beyond comprehension.
This fact could not be disregarded when describing his bizarre case. I decided that I would supervise him in the hospital for about a week, so I could observe his evolution attentively. This would require, to an extent, his acceptance, and I was not certain he would acquiesce to that demand. There was no other option available nor plausible. Simply, I could not allow him to inflict harm on himself or another innocent person in society.
Before I visited Monnier the following day, I was contacted by his brother, who was living in Paris. He wanted to see me in person, and I telephoned him, acknowledging my interest in speaking with him. He came to the hospital afterwards to confer about his brother’s mental condition. If there was someone who could disclose more information about his past and present, it would naturally be a close kindred of Monnier.
When he spoke, I recognised an unsettled look in his eyes, as if he had taken into consideration my professional opinions as his brother’s doctor. His name was Maurice, and he was a prominent architect who had inherited his father’s occupation. He was a well-attired fellow and a polyhistor, but I sensed that his brother’s illness brought shame to him and his proud family.
This was then substantiated by him, and his solicitous expression was a sign of his earnest argument, which had no opacity in its veracity. He also mentioned the fact that as a child, Monnier would stammer. I was already apprised of this about my patient.
I was more interested in his personal trauma and the obsession that had led to his evolving hyperprosexia and agonised shaking than his brother’s prestige. My curiosity to know about his knowledge of any of the members of Monnier’s regiment was of imperative significance to me.
He had never met any of them in person, and Monnier spoke nothing of them, as if he were hiding a secret concerning the fate of his comrades on the battlefield. The only pertinent thing his brother was able to vouchsafe was the fact that he had kept a letter written by Monnier during his wearisome days in the trenches. In this specific letter, which he shared with me, I read the discomposing words of the harrowing nature of his diurnal tumult in action.
The place was in the hilly and forested region of the Ardennes. Monnier was part of the French Fifth Army that attacked the Germans through the Ardennes forest in support of the French invasion of Lorraine. The Germans had launched a counter-attack against the French advance into Lorraine.
Their massive armies had ultimately defeated the French armies and forced them to retreat. In this letter was the mention of several of the proud soldiers of Monnier’s regiment who had died in that battle. The names were Antoine, Bastien, Clément, Édouard, Enzo, Gabin, and Gaétan. These were the unforgettable names of the tormenting demons of Monnier. Before Maurice departed, I thanked him and swore that I would help his brother return to his prior lucidity and stability; although I could not promise that completion, given the sombre truth of his brother’s condition.
In the morning, I went to Monnier’s home and found him pacing in the garden nearby. Apparently, he had been awaiting my immediate arrival. His visible appearance troubled me, and his words would trouble me even more. According to him, he had buried the tin toy soldiers early that morning, but what he mentioned left me absolutely speechless. He told me that after burying them in a mound near the garden, the tin toy soldiers had returned to their place in the house.
He had wanted to show me the mound and then the soldiers, but I wished to examine him at the hospital. He refused and suggested that I spend an entire night with him at his house. If I agreed, then he would come with me to the hospital. I sensed that it would not be detrimental if I stayed the night. This would allow me to closely supervise his condition and actions in person. The issue of his delusions had begun to obsess his mind incessantly.
I went back to the hospital to make the necessary preparations for Monnier’s stay. I spoke to the nurses, who would assist me in this endeavour, and gave them concise instructions on how to deal with Monnier. I could not foresee his outbursts, but I was fully aware of his combative spirit.
I took that into consideration when speaking to them. Once everything was finalised, I returned to Monnier’s residence. When I arrived, he was in his room, resting in bed like a helpless infant. I did not disturb him; instead, I asked one of the servants where he had put the tin toy soldiers. The servant promptly escorted me to the room.
The room was shut tight and required a key to open it, but Monnier had the key. I said that I would enter the room afterwards, once Monnier was awake. In the meantime, I took a glass of Parisian wine as I waited for Monnier to awaken. His family had been loyal members of the French democracy since the fervent days of independence.
It was around evening when Monnier rose from his bed to see me. He was eager for a lengthy conversation, and I was willing to listen. He was restless despite his repose, and I perceived that he needed to make another revealing disclosure that was unknown to me. I listened as he spoke, with a strange look of urgent desperation in his fearful eyes.
I supposed that his persistent dread was contributed to by his untamed hallucinations. What he wanted to tell me was that he was going to burn the house down to ashes, in order to destroy the tin toy soldiers. This was the only way he had conceived to destroy them, but it was sheer insanity to hear him suggest such an audacious plan. Who, in their right mind, would burn down their own house? I attempted to dissuade him through logic and persuasion, but he was determined to do exactly what he had proposed.
He was adamant about disproving my incredulity and told me that when the hour came, he would finally prove his story to me. I doubted the veracity of his statement and mentally prepared myself for a terrible display of a mind at its most susceptible stage of conjecture.
When the dreaded hour of truth, as he had implied, arrived, I followed him to the door that closed off the room where the tin toy soldiers were kept. I had instructed one of his servants to be present as we approached the room near the stairway.
As we reached the door, a strange noise became audible to my ears. The sound stirred and increased in volume by the second. Monnier warned me that what we were about to witness was real and not staged by anyone. He entrusted me to help him in the total destruction of the tin toy soldiers.
Suddenly, he took a gun from his pocket and uttered the memorable words: ‘Can’t you hear them? Listen closely and you will. They are marching behind the door. I tell you, they are coming for us! We cannot let them escape. They must be stopped!’
His erratic behaviour was unstoppable, and I feared for my life. ‘What are you doing, Monnier? Put that gun away and allow me to sedate you with medication. I can help you be rid of the constant demons and the voices in your head, but you must permit me to sedate you. I can treat you at the hospital if you come with me now!’
He kicked the door open and there before us stood, indeed, the tin toy soldiers. He screamed, ‘They will not get me! Believe me, doctor, when I tell you they are alive. Look—you did not believe me before. Am I mad now?’
I was in utter shock to see them moving and, above all, alive as we were. They marched towards us and charged, with a yell and fury. I froze in my bewilderment while Monnier began to shoot at them instantly. The tin toy soldiers fired back, and Monnier fell to the ground forthwith. Before he collapsed, he shot at the chandelier above. The chandelier fell on many of the soldiers and caused the draperies to catch fire swiftly.
The fire spread through the entire room and onto the rest of the property. The servant who was with me hastened to the nearest door to escape the rising flames. Before we escaped, my last haunting impression was of the house burning down, the tin toy soldiers melting in the fire and perishing completely.
At first, I could not reconcile the surreal incident with our eventual reality, but the indisputable facts could not be truncated or denied. I realised that whatever supernatural agency I had witnessed was not for public consumption in the daily newspapers. Thus, Guy Monnier was dead. His unbelievable story would die with him and remain an inexplicable mystery forever.
At midnight, unable to sleep, he would wander the halls, the echo of his footsteps swallowed by the heavy silence. He would pause near the sealed room, his ear pressed to the cool wood. For a moment, all was still. Then, faintly, he would hear it—a tiny, rhythmic tapping, as though miniature feet were marching across a hollow floor. His breath hitched. He would tell himself it was the wind, the creaking of old timbers. Yet, the sound grew louder, and now he was sure he heard the faint metallic clink of tiny rifles being shouldered. He would stumble back, unnerved, and returned hastily to his room, bolting the door behind him.
I had a vivid dream the following night, where I found myself on a battlefield, surrounded by toy soldiers who had grown to human size, their tin faces twisted into grotesque mockeries of life. Monnier stood beside me, shouting orders as the soldiers advanced, bayonets gleaming under a blood-red sky. I awoke drenched in sweat, my heart pounding, the echo of their war cry still ringing in my ears.
A week afterwards, after returning to my own residence, I found myself unable to rest. The house was silent save for the occasional groan of old timbers settling into the night, but my mind refused to settle. I sat in my study, nursing a glass of brandy, my gaze fixed upon the low glow of the lamp. The shadows seemed to stretch and shift in the corners of the room, echoing the disquiet in my thoughts.
Monnier’s tale, strange as it was, gnawed at me with quiet insistence. I am a man of science, trained to interpret symptoms and dismiss superstition, but his fevered account—his insistence that the soldiers had followed him from the battlefields of Verdun—planted a seed of doubt I could not easily uproot. I found myself recalling the look in his eyes: that haunted, hollow gaze that no mere malady of the mind could fully explain.
I stood and began to pace, each step echoing softly in the stillness. My eyes wandered to the bookshelf, and almost of their own accord, my fingers traced the spines of old medical texts and case studies of hysteria and combat trauma. None of them seemed sufficient tonight. There was something—something otherworldly—about Monnier’s affliction that resisted categorisation.
A sudden noise—a soft clink—snapped me from my reverie. I turned sharply, heart racing. On my desk, where I had left only papers and my untouched medical bag, something gleamed in the lamplight. My pulse quickened as I stepped closer.
It was a toy soldier.
A tin soldier, upright, perfectly balanced on the edge of a sheet of notes. For a moment, I simply stared, unable to comprehend. Had I brought it back with me, unknowingly? Had Monnier, in his mania, slipped it into my bag as some cruel jest—or a desperate plea?
I seized the tiny figure and examined it closely: its painted eyes, its chipped rifle, its worn uniform—so ordinary, and yet now charged with a malign presence that seemed to radiate from the cold metal. Shaken, I dropped it into a drawer and slammed it shut, as though I might trap whatever unsettling power it carried.
And yet, long after I extinguished the lamp and lay in bed, I could still feel it there, its presence pressing at the edges of my mind. Sleep eluded me entirely. I lay awake, eyes fixed on the dark ceiling, and wondered—not for the first time—whether Monnier’s madness was his alone…or whether it had already begun to seep into my own soul.
In the month following my unsettling visit to Monnier’s residence, a singular obsession began to creep upon me, one that I could neither dismiss nor rationalise. The names—those seven names he had recited with such grave solemnity: Antoine, Bastien, Clément, Édouard, Enzo, Gabin, Gaétan—they echoed in my mind like a sinister litany, as though each syllable carried a hidden weight, a cipher of some unfathomable truth. What had once seemed a madman's babble now gnawed incessantly at the edges of my scepticism.
Unable to quiet the growing disquiet within me, I resolved to seek answers where answers might reasonably be found. On a mist-laden afternoon, I paid a visit to the old military archives housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s shadowed annex on the Rue des Martyrs. The building itself was a relic of a bygone age, its Gothic façades blackened with soot and age, its towering arched windows like the hollow eyes of a long-dead colossus. Within, silence reigned—a silence heavy and absolute, broken only by the occasional creak of the ancient woodwork and the distant, reverberating chime of an unseen clock.
The archivist, a thin, pale man with pince-nez glasses and an expression of perpetual irritation, led me through the labyrinth of shelves to the section devoted to the records of Monnier’s regiment. I thanked him and was left alone in a small alcove, surrounded by a fortress of brittle, yellowing tomes. Dust swirled in the dim shafts of light, and as I opened the first ledger, a dry, musty scent rose—an olfactory whisper of the countless lives documented and interred within those pages.
I spent hours there, hunched over the faded ink and stiff parchment, my fingers tracing rows of names, dates of conscription, battlefield assignments, and, finally, the stark, chilling column marked "Morts au Champ d'Honneur." My eyes moved methodically, at first with clinical detachment, but gradually with mounting urgency, as if some hidden force compelled me forward.
And then I found them.
One by one, the names emerged like revenants from the depths of the past. Antoine Duval: tué à l'ennemi, Verdun, 1916. Bastien Moreau: mort sous les tirs ennemis, Verdun, 1916. Clément Lefèvre, Édouard Petit, Enzo Marchand, Gabin Fournier, Gaétan Simon—all of them killed in the same brutal engagement, mere days apart, their final resting places marked by the simple cross of the fallen. The coincidence was too precise, too exacting to be dismissed as random.
A sharp breath caught in my throat, and I sat back, the brittle page trembling slightly in my grasp. These were no imaginary foes conjured by a fevered mind; they had lived, fought, and died on the sodden, blood-soaked fields of France. And yet, in Monnier’s fractured world, they had returned—transfigured into grotesque caricatures of war, tin effigies imbued with vengeance, or perhaps born of some deeper, unspoken guilt.
I stared at the pages for a long moment, the names blurring as my mind reeled from the implications. A strange chill began to settle over me, wrapping around my shoulders like a damp cloak. It was as though the very air within the archive had thickened, pregnant with unseen eyes watching from the gloom of the stacks. Every rustle of paper, every creak of the wooden shelves, sounded suddenly like whispers from another world, echoing the sins and sorrows of forgotten men.
Unable to bear the oppressive stillness any longer, I closed the ledger carefully and gathered my notes. The tall windows, which earlier had glowed faintly with the last vestiges of daylight, were now darkened entirely, streaked with rain that pattered against the glass like restless fingers. I descended the narrow stairway to the exit, my footsteps echoing in the cavernous silence, the weight of my discovery pressing down upon me like an invisible yoke.
Out on the street, the night had fallen fully, and the mist had thickened into a near-impenetrable fog that swirled around the lampposts like pale ghosts. As I walked briskly back to my lodgings, the echo of my footsteps seemed to pursue me, each step heavy with a foreboding I could not shake.
That night, lying awake in my dimly lit room, I replayed every moment in the archive, every name, every date, every fading letter inscribed by the hands of those who had borne witness to the carnage of war. And it struck me with chilling clarity: whatever had haunted Monnier—whether guilt, trauma, or some darker force still—had left an indelible mark upon reality itself. These soldiers, these men of flesh and blood, had become something else in the tormented theatre of his mind. And now, in some inexplicable way, that theatre had extended its stage to include me.
In my bones, I felt it: Monnier’s tragedy was not merely his own. Whatever forces he had summoned—or succumbed to—had not been entirely laid to rest. As the clock in my room struck midnight, a chill breeze whispered through the cracked window, and I could not help but wonder if, somewhere in the ashes of Monnier’s ruined home, those tin soldiers still marched.
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