Harry Turtledove

Chester wasn’t about to commit the sin of optimism. Justifiably or not, he feared it would jinx everything.

“All things considered, we got away cheap.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. We got away cheap. The dead and the maimed would not agree with the exec. Sam found that he was inclined to. War measured what you dished out against what you took.

Like a man who’d sweet-talked a girl into bed with him, Sergeant Pound cared little about the whys and wherefores. All he cared about was that it had happened.

The kid from the State Department disappeared. Jake stared after him. Either they really were making them younger than they had once upon a time or he himself was starting to get some serious mileage on him. He suspected the problem did not lie with the State Department.

“Have you noticed there’s something funny in the budget?”

“There’s always something funny in the budget,” Flora answered. “We’re in a war. That just makes it funnier than usual.”

The featured entrée with something called Swiss steak. It struck him as a good reason for emigrating from Switzerland.

“Hang on, Doc!” he called. “I got mail for youse guys.”

Youse guys was as far outside the bounds of ordinary English as the Confederate y’all. A lot of languages had separate forms for second-person singular and plural. English didn’t, but kept trying to invent them.

Will be appointed. Will be accepted. Will be permitted. Abell didn’t say who would do any of those things. He probably didn’t even think about it. In his world, things just happened, without any particular agency. That made him a good bureaucrat. Whether it made him a good soldier was a different question.

Will anything be left of either side when this war is over? Potter wondered. More and more, it reminded him of a duel of submachine guns at two paces. Both countries could strike better than they could defend.

Dowling had long since abandoned optimism along with the other illusions of his youth.

The difference between bad and worse is a lot bigger than the difference between good and better.

Second Lieutenant Don Griffiths was typical of the breed. He was young, he didn’t know much, and one of the things he didn’t know was how much he didn’t know.