Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God—a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bamboozle myself into

he was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he might cause others.

I said, ‘We seem to have talked about pretty nearly everything except God. We’d better leave him to the small hours.’ ‘You don’t believe in Him, do you?’ ‘No.’ ‘Things to me wouldn’t make sense without Him.’ ‘They don’t make sense to me with him.’

‘It’s not a matter of reason or justice. We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out. War and Love—they have always been compared.’

‘Great victory north-west of Hanoi. French recaptured two villages they never told us they’d lost. Heavy Vietminh casualties. Haven’t been able to count their own yet but will let us know in a week or two.’

Aimer à loisir, Aimer et mourir Au pays qui te ressemble.

So much of the war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn’t seem worth starting even a train of thought.

‘Have you any hunch,’ he asked, ‘why they killed him? and who?’ Suddenly I was angry; I was tired of the whole pack of them with their private stores of Coca-Cola and their portable hospitals and their too wide cars and their not quite latest guns. I said, ‘Yes. They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and

‘Why don’t you just go away, Pyle, without causing trouble?’ ‘It wouldn’t be fair to her, Thomas,’ he said quite seriously. I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.