"He had to give orders that meant men died, and sometimes sacrifice hundreds, thousands of them, knowingly sending them to their near-certain deaths, just to secure some important position or goal, or protect some vital position. And always, whether they liked it or not, the civilians suffered too; the very people they both claimed to be fighting for made up perhaps the bulk of the casualties in their bloody struggle. He had tried to stop it, tried to bargain, from the beginning, but neither side wanted peace on anything except its own terms, and he had no real political power, and so had had to fight."
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Horror authorsPoets from ScotlandNovelists from ScotlandShort story writers from ScotlandScience fiction authors from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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Chapter I (p. 443).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Iain_Banks
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Iain Banks
Iain Menzies Banks (February 16, 1954 – June 9, 2013), officially Iain Banks, was a Scottish writer. As Iain M. Banks he wrote science fiction; as Iain Banks he wrote literary fiction.
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