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War! Flies settling like a black stain over a man’s entrails as he weeps with the pain and holds his body together with crimson fingers, hoping for a miracle. Hunger, cold, fear, disease, gangrene, death! War for soldiers.
“By nature of definition only the coward is capable of the highest heroism”.’
‘We stand between the sea and the mountains. The sea will crush us against the mountain and thus we die. The mountain will hold us against the sea, allowing us to be crushed. Still we die.
That our defence will fail is no reason to avoid the battle. For it is the motive that is pure, and not the outcome.
My father says he was like a giant that day. Inhuman. Like a god of war.’
‘When he stares, valleys tremble,’ quoted Vintar, ‘where he walks, beasts are silent, when he speaks, mountains tumble, when he fights, armies crumble.’
‘A man needs many things in his life to make it bearable. A good woman. Sons and daughters. Comradeship. Warmth. Food and shelter. But above all these things, he needs to be able to know that he is a man. ‘And what is a man? He is someone who rises when life has knocked him down. He is someone who raises his fist to heaven when a storm has ruined his crop – and then plants again. And again. A man remains unbroken by the savage twists of fate.
Life, he knew, breaks many men. Some as strong as oak wither as their wives die, or leave them, as their children suffer or starve. Other strong men break if they lose a limb; or worse, the use of their legs or their eyesight. Each man has a breaking point, no matter how strong his spirit. Somewhere, deep inside him, there is a flaw that only the fickle cruelty of fate can find. A man’s strength is ultimately born of his knowledge of his own weakness,
‘Liberty is only valued when it is threatened, therefore it is the threat that highlights the value.
‘The point is,’ he said, ‘that you don’t know whether you’ve lost – until you’ve lost.
Tough and strong as a bull, maybe, but old. Worn out by time, the enemy that never tired.
‘Some of you are probably thinking that you may panic and run. You won’t! Others are worried about dying. Some of you will. But all men die. No one ever gets out of this life alive.
So a young farmer with wife and children decides to go home. Good! He shows a sense which men like you and I will never understand. They will sing songs about us, but he will ensure that there are people to sing them. He plants. We destroy.
‘Most people are when it comes down to it. It’s an art,’ said Rek. ‘The thing to do is relax and enjoy the silences. That’s what friends are all about – they are people with whom you can be silent.’
had been a soldier, longing to be a warrior; now he was a warrior longing to be anything else.
‘All things that live must die,’ said Vintar. ‘Man alone, it seems, lives all his life in the knowledge of death. And yet there is more to life than merely waiting for death. For life to have meaning, there must be a purpose. A man must pass something on – otherwise he is useless.
