Birdsong Quotes- Part 2 France 1916

"he lay rocked between the fear of being buried by a shell, consumed in the earth they had crawled under, and the overpowering need to lose consciousness of the noise that assailed them"

"The first officer's voice was cold"

"Some of these young officers blow hot and cold. Mr Wraysford is the strangest one I've seen"

"There were things he had thought he might never see again, signs that life had persisted outside the narrow inferno of his existence"

"The leaving of this undistinguished village now seemed to him the most difficult parting he had had to make; no sundering from parents, wife or child, no poignant station farewell, could have been undertaken with heavier heart than the brief march back through the fields of France"

"he believed the war would grow very much worse before there was a chance of its getting better"

"They feared shell wounds more than bullets because they had seen the damage they did"

"you liked the war when it started"

"This is not war, this is an exploration of how far men can be degraded"

"If I didn't have that curiosity I would walk into enemy lines and let myself be killed. I would blow my own head off"

"I've never ever been with a woman"

"What he and the men endured was the punishment for what he had done"

"seemed no more really than a pale version of what womanhood could achieve. Stephen viewed all women in this way"

"Something had been buried that was not yet dead"

"His desire to defeat and kill them was something he cherished"

"There seemed to him a great breach of nature which no one had the power to stop"

"You've got to make them love you"

"Look at this world they've created here, this kind of hell. I would kill them all if I could"

"Stephen loomed from the half-light toward him"

"Stephen was appalled at the idea of being seperated from the men he had fought with"

"I think children need to believe in powers outside themselves"

"The love Jack felt towards his son redeemed his view of human life and gave substance to his faith in God"

"The body was only flesh, but she had taken hers away from him: and in her physical absence there was more than missing flesh: there was abandonment"

"no more than animal matter, less dear, less valuable than the flesh of men he had seen die"

"He did not know what he was doing. He hated her for not having seen what he had seen"

"I will not let this shake my faith"

"Having communed with their beginnings they wanted to die where they were without enduring the day ahead of them"

"you are a mad, cold-hearted devil and that is what we are going to need"

"Some crime against nature is about to be committed"

"There was for once no sound of birds"

"Skylarks wheeled and sang high in the cloudless sky. He felt alone, as though he had stumbled on this fresh world at the instant of its creation"

"Please let them send no more men into this hurricane"

"pulled the silver cross from his chest and hurled it from him"

"Out of 800 men in the battalion who had gone over the parapet, 155 answered their names"

"As he listened to the soil protesting, he heard the sound of a new world"