On July 21, 1944, my uncle Bert Cohen of the 6th South African Armored Division, 19th Field Ambulance, reached Italy’s Monte Cassino, abandoned by German forces a few weeks earlier after repeated Allied assaults.

He made an entry in his war diary: “Poor Cassino, horror, wreck and desolation unbelievable, roads smashed and pitted, mines, booby traps and graves everywhere. Huge shell holes, craters filled with stagnant slime, smashed buildings, hardly outlines remaining, a silent sight of ghosts and shadows. Pictures should be taken of this monument to mankind’s worst moments and circulated through every schoolroom in the world.”

This was the Memento Mori proposed by my uncle, then aged 25 and recently arrived in a bloody continent called Europe. Those pictures were not circulated; and the miracle and fragility of European peace is too often forgotten.

In April of that year, Capt. Cohen, born in the last year of World War I and now thrust into World War II, had crossed from Egypt to Italy, sailing beneath searchlights that “deftly flick their fingers across the face of the sky.” He wondered at the “circumstances that should bring me — plain-routine, rut-living Bertie Cohen of Johannesburg — to be driving in a cumbersome truck through a rural part of southern Italy.”

War is a gale. It scoops up routine lives and (when it does not end them) scatters them here and there, never again to be reconstituted in the same form. Whether my uncle would in any event have emigrated from South Africa is impossible to know.

He left first for Chicago where he gained a master’s degree in Dental Science from Northwestern University in 1948, and ultimately for London where, in 1960, he became the first Nuffield Research Professor of Dental Science at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. An oral pathologist of great distinction, he was above all a scientist of wide-ranging interests, a man passionate about literature and art, a stranger to the narrow specialization in vogue today. In 1982, he was appointed C.B.E. (Commander of the Order of the British Empire), an honor he accepted but never talked about. He wore his many accomplishments lightly.

I relate all this because my uncle died last month at the age of 95 and I have since found my life consumed by his. Each of us is allotted one life. Bert needed two. As the fragments from his diary suggest, he wanted to be a writer.

Early short stories showed promise. He talked his way, as a teenager, into becoming South African correspondent of the boxing magazine, “The Ring,” and filed many a fine dispatch. His diary places him, more than once, on the brink of giving up dentistry for a life of writing. It was not to be. Reading of the road not taken, I understood better Bert’s passionate interest in my work. Childless, he was living through me what he had wanted to do.

Now he lives in me. The living are the custodians of the souls of the dead, those stealthy migrants. Love bequeaths this responsibility.

I might never have known him. On April 24, 1945, he was ordered into a bend in the Penaro River where a Nazi column was trapped. The fighting was brutal. An artillery battery pulverized the enclave. Wounded horses, nostrils flared in gasping horror, bayed — a terrible sound. In the carnage ammunition exploded and tires burst. One dead German in particular caught Bert’s eye: a blond square-jawed young man, hair flecked with blood and smoke, legs twisted grotesquely, abdomen ripped open, coils of gut spilling through a ragged gash into the dust, sightless blue eyes gazing at infinity.

Beside the corpse lay letters from the soldier’s mother in Hamburg. She talked about Der Angriff, the Allied bombardment of the city. Uncertain what to do, Bert returned the letters to the dead man’s pocket. That single German corpse haunted my uncle. Bert dwelt on him as if this death was his responsibility, or as if he, a Jew from South Africa, might somehow have brought this handsome young man, Hitler’s model Aryan, back to the life denied him. Bert thought that he should have kept the letters, perhaps to return them to a bereaved mother in Hamburg.

This tantalizing image stayed with me. So did another. On Oct. 14, 1944, near Florence, a small bird settled on Bert’s shoulder. It remained there for five days. This extraordinary encounter, caught in a photograph on the banks of the Arno, caused Florentines to prostrate themselves, name Bert “Captain Uccellino” (or “Little Bird”) and proclaim him a saint. He was far from that but he had about him something magical.

Of that the days since his death have left no doubt. He is now that bird on my shoulder, reminding me to take care with my spelling and be aware that love alone redeems human affairs.