Strange Meeting

Isn’t that why you read him to try and make some sense of all this?

He tried not to count over all the possible ways in which, after tomorrow, he was going to die.

I’m afraid of myself, of what I’m becoming.

Had seen that Barton has appalled by the sight of Feurvy, as he had not been by the sight of the dead pilot in the crashed plane.

He wanted to take the body … and dig a grave for him… for would that have been more purposeful, would he have done the first thing of vague since coming into this war?

He was almost beside himself in a rush of dread on Barton’s behalf.

There is no one that knows. Don’t go.

They seem like some dream country which we inhabited long ago.

This agony of feeling on behalf of someone else was entirely new to him.

That day it hit me, that I’d been feeling nothing. I’d become entirely callous.

But I have been ashamed of myself for getting so thoroughly hardened so quickly.

He thought I want to go back for there was nothing for him here.

He knew that when he left here, he would not be able to believe that it would all continue to exist.

the old familiar stumps of rotten black teeth.

Men could never be so stupid, John! After all this!

The letters were so full of formal expressions of love and sympathy.

I’ve been trying…give it a point and purpose when there are none.

We had better not start building castles in Spain.

He can’t wait to get his bayonet into someone, which I find very chilling, and more so because he is basically a nice chap.

But wasn’t Harris better off? For would he not have gone through terror after terror in the front line, only to meet a death less sudden, more painful, more clearly foreseen?

She was like the others. Understood nothing.

The War? I shouldn’t think that’s possible.

You can’t feel everyman’s death.

His initial excitement had gone long since.

John says one of the most difficult things is getting used to new faces, new faces.

It is the constant possibility of accident which erodes ones courage most of all.

John says he may have a head to lose but certainly not a heart.

Then he thought that he could hear the thudding of the guns. But there were so many noises now, imagined or remembered.

There will never be another war.

Oh it was like meeting ghosts.

He thought, we need him, he has something that none of us have.

…pieces of a past belonging to some stranger.

We can imagine it thats all.

We are drones not fighting men.