"A Long Long Way" Quotes

But it was his father who had put him on the path to soldiering. And it was his father who had brought him to the front door of this world of blood and terror.

And there is a great beauty in that, in disowning the land, in giving oneself up to a new life, a new body, a new family, a new country.

Nothing of any good could come of this war, he had always felt. Any fool could see that. It was the work of madmen.

It was a salutary lesson in the value of human life against the backdrop of war, where all the old rules of decency seemed to be suspended.

This was the war then, a world of lies and imbecilities and distortions, at the heart of which was the vain, deluded figure of his father.

He was not a hero, he was not a warrior, he was not a soldier. He was a messenger boy, a runner, a boy who carried a message and would bring back another.

His own death, his own physical end, had been something he had never considered. It was utterly outside the realm of his imagination.

Sometimes I felt like a bit of a ghost myself, wandering through the world, unseen, unnoticed, like one of those invisible spirits the poets write about.

In a war, a man's soul is as expendable as his body. And that was the pitiless lesson. The pitiless lesson of war.

He had felt the earth move under him. The earth was a living thing, he thought, and this was its pulse.