The First Casualty

Kingsley watched her disappear from the room, wondering if his heart would break. Logic informed him that of course it would not. The heart was no more than a muscle, a pump which distributed blood about the body; it had nothing whatsoever to do with a man's emotions. But if that was the case, why did it ache so?

But these are only words and probably convey only a fraction of their meaning to the hearers. They shudder and it is forgotten.

[H]e was damned if he was going to water down his arguments simply to satisfy the preference of the mob for dogma and ignorance.

Don't you just love the army? They take a fellow who's been turned into a catatonic mute by being shelled from here to Christmas and say he's not yet been properly diagnosed but he seems a bit nervous.

I'm twenty-two and a woman. One of the ways men diminish women's status and our contribution whilst simultaneously entrenching their quasi-paternal male authority is to call us girls. Girls go to school, Captain. Women tend the wounded, make the shells and drive the ambulances.

Oh yes, you know that men are dying, dying in their thousands day after day. Everybody knows that. But you don't know what it's like. You could spend the rest of your life trying to imagine it but you'd never get even close. …Let me tell you, Kingsley, nothing, no words in the English language or any other bloody language for that matter, could ever describe what it's like.

Once more, and for the fourth time, the war would most definitely not be over by Christmas.