The spoils of war

Yes, I try to forget, but you wrench these memories from me like the gold teeth I extracted from that gallant Frenchman on the fields of the Somme.
The rounds whistled like throstles that day as I crouched by his broken body and took my windfall. What was death to me in that hellish maw? Had I been there at Flanders or seen the very Angels of Mons I would still have stopped to fill my pockets with these ingots. These molars are life. And just as the dragon tooth, when sowed can bring power, so my find should bring me a great life once I returned from the blasted front.
Next thing I was flung into a scarified tree by a falling shell which disrupted a nearby corpse into flakes of its former shape. I passed out and woke in a field hospital. I felt the doctors whispered as they left my bedside. They later shipped me off to Scotland for recuperation. I had to sleep with one eye open for the men of my ward surely knew what secret lay in my pyjama pocket. But it was to no avail. The teeth were lost one night and I could do naught to request their return.
One morning Wilfred recited a poem of his about a beggar who went to war and stole from the dead. He called it 'The Ghoul' and likened the sorry beast to the grave worrying scientist, M. Frankenstein himself. I scowled and shrank into my bed. Siegfried laughed loudly at his friends' joke, and as he guffawed I swear I caught the glint of gold in his mouth.