“I didn’t start to speak against those orders until, what, September 1915, and then only to my family, quietly. It was already too late. The generals understood the scale of the weapon they had; they weren’t going to let it go unused. Some arcanists were drunk on power, and many more were too caught up to stop, and an awful lot of us knew it was catastrophic, but we believed in those simple rules. It’s so much easier to obey orders. It’s not much fun to think.”
