Sublime

“The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive.”

Bulldozer is very different from the brigade commander. Although he, too, is traumatized by the war of ’48, his mental injury is not the same. Rough and coarse, he tends to raise his voice too much. He’s tense and quick-tempered, restless. He admits that in the damned war he lost his peace of mind. In the many years since, he has not been able to

The United States, unlike the British, the French, or the Germans, treated soldiers as interchangeable parts. As parts wore out, new parts were shipped in to keep units at full strength. These replacements were invariably green, and unit cohesion suffered from the dribble of new men constantly coming in.

To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and

Édouard avait d’autres plans, ce qui se passe dans son propre pays l’intéresse davantage que ces disputes de paysans balkaniques, mais il pense qu’à bientôt cinquante ans il n’a jamais été à la guerre, que c’est une expérience qu’un homme doit faire un jour, il dit donc oui.