Victorious troops are those who kill more, and here we were the victims. This put the finishing touch to our demoralisation. The soldiers had lost conviction long ago. Now they lost confidence.

Men were snoring, twitching and whimpering, struggling with nightmares less terrible than reality.

They had also brought in a piece of human scrap so monstrous that everyone recoiled at the sight, that it shocked men who were no longer shockable. I shut my eyes; I had already seen far too much and I wanted to be able to forget eventually. This thing, this being, screamed in a corner like a maniac. The revulsion that turned our stomachs told us that it would be an act of generosity, a fraternal act, to finish him off.

In short, the war got off to a pretty good start, with the help of chaos.

I had been astonished to find myself in the middle of the war yet not be able to find it, unable to accept that in fact the war consisted precisely of this stasis.