"I had never seen war, or even talked of it with someone who had, but I was young and knew something of violence, and so believed that war would be no more than a new experience for me... War is not a new experience; it is a new world. Its inhabitants are more different from human beings that Famulimus and her friends. Its laws are new, and even its geography is new, because it is a geography in which insignificant hills and hollows are lifted to the importance of cities. Just as our familiar Urth holds such monstrosities as Erebus, Abaia and Arioch, so the world of war is stalked by monsters called battles, whose cells are individuals but who have a life and intelligence of their own, and whom one approaches through an ever-thickening array of portents."