"Still, the more sardonic they became, the more he cared for them. Still he could not quite believe them, he could not comprehend the lengths to which they allowed themselves to be driven."

"If they could shout loud enough they might bring the world back to it's senses, they might laugh loud enough to raise the dead."

"I feel guilty that I have survived when all the others are gone."

"Shells will fall on the reserve lines and we will not stop talking."

"No child or future generation will know what this was like."

"His own [childhood] seemed so long ago that it was as is someone had lived it for him."

"He could remember this compassion but he no longer felt it."

"There would be some decorum in their dying beneath the country they had fought so long to protect."

"There was a perverse appeal in the thought he could complete what no enemy had managed."

"We’ve all gone now. The whole of our little group."

"They mocked him for still being alive."

"It made him laugh, mad-eyed and bearded, like a hermit in his cave."

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

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

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

"She was like the others. Understood nothing."

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

"…pieces of a past belonging to some stranger."

"There is no one that knows. Don’t go."

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

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

"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."

"We can imagine it thats all."

"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?"

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

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

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

"Oh it was like meeting ghosts."

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

"His initial excitement had gone long since."

"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?"

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

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

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

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

"You can’t feel everyman’s death."

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

"I love you John."

"We are drones not fighting men."

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

"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."

"the old familiar stumps of rotten black teeth."

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

"There will never be another war."

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

"We had better not start building castles in Spain."

"Tap my head and mic my brain / stick that needle in my vein"

"Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled “black” by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars."

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."

"The odors of shit, death, sweat, sickness, mildew, piss, the breathing of Dora, wrapped him as he crept in staring at the naked corpses being carried out now that America was so close, to be stacked in front of the crematoriums, the men’s penises hanging, their toes clustering white and round as pearls... each face so perfect, so individual, the lips stretched back into death-grins, a whole silent audience caught at the punch line of the joke... and the living, stacked ten to a straw mattress, the weakly crying, coughing, losers... All his vacuums, his labyrinths, had been on the other side of this. While he lived, and drew marks on paper, this invisible kingdom had crept on, in the darkness outside... all this time.... Pokler vomited. He cried some. The walls did not dissolve -- no prison wall ever did, not from tears, not at this finding, on every pallet, in every cell, that the faces are ones he knows after all, and holds dear as himself, and cannot, then, let them return to that silence..."