To reassure his daughter he began explaining what useless muskets the Royal Army had; the barrels of those enormous pieces had no rifling, he said, so bullets coming from them would have very little penetration: technical comments thought up on the spur of the moment, understood by few and convincing none but consoling all, including Concetta, as they managed to transform war into a neat little diagram of fire-trajectories from the very squalid and very positive chaos that it really was.
