"Clerks and constables, barracks and precincts, municipalities, documents, offices: all of this was seen by our heroes [mobilized Croatian peasants] as a machine that was invented by educated city folk for the sole purpose of letting the blood of paupers and counting the peasants' bags, pigs, and mares; however, this entire machinery of educated folk and doctors of the Triune Kingdom underestimated the great and indomitable life inside them, and when our heroes thought about themselves and their life, this is what it looked like, more or less: this is my hut; it has a slanted roof so that rain flows left and right instead of falling on my head. It's a good invention, not having the rain fall on one's head, and I inherited it from my grandfather, this sooty warm roof, and I will leave it to my son, because a roof is a smart thing. (Without a roof, man would be like a beast.) I sit under this mushroom of mine and watch the smoke go up, while the waters of heaven flow and soak the fields. This is good too. My wife sits at the loom like a spider, there is a potato rolling in my pot, and there should be a couple of fat smoked ribs on the attic. That is all. Honestly, I don't need more. Life is good! The man lights his pipe in the twilight as he watches yellow cat eyes shining like fireflies in the oxen steam in the stable. Life is good! (...)These people were shot by Hungarian gendarmes, all according to the Compromise of 1868, they had their wives and daughters raped by revolutionaries in 1848 and by deserters after Custozza and Solferino; when their women gave birth, they still cut the umbilical cord themselves, with a sickle, and went to work three days later; the dead were splashed with wine just like in the old pagan times. The fact that huge empires rose and fell on the shores of the European seas, that new lands were discovered, that life fundamentally changed, all of that didn't mean a thing to this life here. Or rather it did! Churches and prisons were built in the valleys: stone buildings with flags and Roman crosses, with lightning rods and church organs, with bars and articles of law; but all those prisons and offices and churches were not there yesterday, and it may come to pass that those churches and documents and articles will not be there tomorrow either, and the villages of Saint Elizabeth and Saint John will be Foxhole and Wolf Pit like before, and we're quits! God be praised!Since they considered things and measured events with this sublime and tried measure, it is quite natural that our heroes weren't too upset about this so-called war."