So they came back from the trenches, and largely survived. Of course, Juni Okuda, as an Asian, was subjected to a lot of the anti-immigration laws and suspicion that pervaded the US at the time, which included attitudes that led to the eventual 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924. Obviously in 1917 (the time of the hallucination/time shift) the Act was not yet in force, but the attitudes at the time were already in place that led to the passage of the law. Asians (such as Juni Okuda) were seen as menial workers, mostly in the “Chinese laundry” or “railroad coolie” fields of endeavor. In the Western United States (California, Oregon and Washington) the restrictions were much more severe than elsewhere, probably because these states with “port cities” had the most obvious Asian immigration (while East Coast cities had immigration from European countries, which could “blend in” as far as physical appearance).

So Juni’s frustration aside, they all survived to return, and somewhere in time is a British Royal Engineers officer who is now, um… “confused”, let’s say, after meeting Specialist Glass. Perhaps now they can get on with their lives, but with an increased since of appreciation for how things have improved for the most part over the ways of the past.

And in the meantime, how about that World War One? Seriously, is it crazy to believe the ONE HUNDRED YEARS have come and gone since? To this day we are still feeling some of the repercussions of that war, even more so than the battles of ancient Greece, or Rome, or even the Napoleonic Wars of 1812. World War One veterans died off to the last just a few years ago as of this writing; it no longer exists in living memory. The tales of old gas bombs and shells still being unearthed are not fiction, this was still a thing for quite a while and just recently, a trench full of German soldiers from that time were unearthed, given their grandchildren a form of closure. How long until this ranks up with battles such as Lepanto or Thermopylae– battles once pivotal to the course of human civilization but now regarded as long-past and almost quaint adjustments of borders that no longer hold any significant meaning to up-to-date scholars?

Generations from now, all the things we fought for and held true and dear will be as dull pontifications in dusty old tomes studied by a sequestered few, as “new history” is made by those who see themselves as harbingers in a dynamic new age.