The Great War: Walk in Hell

Anytime a politician said he wouldn’t beat around the bush, you were well advised to keep your hand on your wallet.

Whites are so mystified, they put race ahead of class.

“What’s obvious,” Morrell observed, “isn’t always true.”

The newspapers extolled every skirmish as one Bonaparte would have admired (clumsy propaganda, in a province that had never reconciled itself to the French revolution), but anyone who believed all the newspapers said deserved nothing better than he got.

“It’s not the way it was any more,” he said, half to himself. “Nothing is the way it was anymore.”

Anyone who forces something on someone and then says he will be better for it—you will, I hope, understand me when I say this is difficult to appreciate.

“Life is hard.” Rodriguez shrugged. “And after life is done, then you die.” He shrugged again. “What can anyone do?”

It was a good question. It was, when Pinkard thought about it, a very good question. If there were any better questions out there, he had no idea what they might be. “You do the best you can, is all,” he answered slowly, and then looked around at the hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere he was currently inhabiting. “If this here is the best I can do, I been doin’ somethin’ wrong up till now.”

Martin was convinced the military police attracted self-righteous sons of bitches the way spilled sugar drew ants.

They’d kill him or he’d kill them. War reduced everything to a brutal simplicity.

What should matter and what does matter, monsieur, are not one and the same thing, I regret to say.

When you were fifteen, you knew everything always turned out fine in the end. Arthur McGregor was a good deal past twice fifteen. He knew how foolish you were at that age.

The lad was at an age where he was inclined to believe things would turn out as he wanted for no better reason than that he wanted them to turn out so.

He truly did not seem to realize that terrorizing everyone who was not ardently on his side to begin with would ensure that he drew few new supporters.

At sixteen, you knew you could do the impossible.

At forty-three, you knew damn well you couldn’t.

The countryside looked as if hell had been there, but had gone away on vacation.

Something does stink down in Richmond. If we try to root it out now, we are liable to lose the war in the confusion that would follow. But if we don’t try to root it out, we are liable to lose the war from the confusion it causes.

“What is the younger generation coming to?” she exclaimed: the cry of the older generation throughout recorded history.

“We’d never—” Alexander began, but he didn’t finish the sentence. When you were in a war, who could say what you might be driven to do?

That was something else war was about: not caring.

He’d learned to strip and clean and reassemble the machine gun till he could do it with his eyes closed. It was an elegantly simple means of killing large numbers of men in a hurry, assuming that was what you wanted to do.

If you started thinking the whole world was like the part of it where you lived, you were going to be wrong a lot of the time.

Scott said, “If things had gone the way they were supposed to, we’d have been in Philadelphia a long time ago.”

“Yeah, and if pigs had wings, we’d all carry umbrellas,” Featherstone replied with a snort “When you’ve been through even a little more fighting, kid, you’re going to see that things just don’t go the way they’re supposed to.”

Know what you’re doing and you’ll never need to cheat.

War would have been a much simpler, easier business with politics out of the mix.

The Book of Mormon is no more the word of God than is an advertising circular for stomach powders.

Nobody was supposed to shoot at people wearing Red Cross armbands, but bullets, as he’d learned too well, weren’t fussy about whom they hit.

Shouldering the bag, Moss made for the canvas tents that housed his new squadron. Such arrangements were all very well now, with the weather warm, but could you live in a tent in the middle of winter? Maybe the war would be over and he wouldn’t have to find out. He clicked tongue between teeth. He believed nonsense like that the year before. He was a tougher sell now.

“How am I supposed to surprise you, Lucius?”

He spread his hands and shrugged. “As long as we’ve been married, and you still expect to surprise me? You make me happy. That is enough, and more than enough. What do I need of surprises?”

Whenever you throw away what’s right for what’s convenient, you end up losing both.

Being sure wasn’t the same thing as being right.

No, he hadn’t a clue. She studied him—perfect coif, perfect clothes, perfect confidence. Inside, where it didn’t show, she smiled a hunter’s smile. Perfect target.

The paper was shipped up from the USA, and full of lies; since the demise of the Rosenfeld Register (which had been only half full of lies), no local paper had been permitted. But even lies could be interesting if they were new lies: why else did people read so many books and magazines?

Isaac might have been emboldened by the whiskey, for he asked Yossel Reisen, “What—is it like at the front?” Emboldened or not, he sounded hesitant.

Yossel looked into the depths of his glass as he had looked through Flora. At last, he answered, “Think of all the worst things you know in the world. Think of them all in one place. Think of them as ten times as bad as they really are. Then think of them ten times worse than that. What you are thinking about when you do that is one ten-thousandth of what the front is like.”

Nobody asked him any more questions.

“Putting the best face on things doesn’t make them right,” Flora said with a stern rectitude of a temperance crusader smashing a bottle of whiskey against a saloon wall.

He’d always been glad he wasn’t an infantryman: if you were a mudfoot, war, and the death and the maiming that went with war, were random and impersonal. What had he just been doing but dealing out random, impersonal death? He thought of himself as a knight in shining armor. What sorts of filthy things had knights done that never got into the pages of Malory and Ivanhoe? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to find out, not really.

He looked down at himself. His imaginary suit of armor seemed to have a patch or two of rust on it. No matter who you were or what you did, you couldn’t stay immaculate, not in this war.

The ability to see what is, sir, is essential for the leader of a great nation.

He was a pretty fair officer, no doubt about it, but he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.

Of course, when you got right down to it, who was?

Any time you could split the difference between what you really wanted and what you would settle for, you weren’t doing too bad.

When Cassius was optimistic about the way the fighting was going, he was often wrong; when he was pessimistic, he was always right.

When war reached out its hand, what did wealth and power matter? A fool with a gun could take them away. A fool with a gun had just taken them away.

“How come they get to call us names whenever they please and we don’t get to call them names whenever we please? That’s not fair.”

“Because they have more guns than we do, and they drove our soldiers out of this part of the country,” he told her. “If you have more guns in a war, you get to say what’s fair.”

But destroying white privilege only boosted white fear.