Tides of War by Steven Pressfield Page B

such catalogs, Jason. They are written in blood. Quill’s was no impartial manifest of civil foes or political opponents; his accounted neighbors and friends, comrades and kinsmen who had in their hour wreaked ruin upon him. They had slaughtered his wife and daughters. His brother had been torn from the altar and butchered before his own children’s eyes. I had never known one to hate as Quill. He was no longer a man but a vessel into which hatred had been decanted. There was no negotiating with one like him, and they were all like him.
    Later when the city fell, our company held eighty-two captives of the lists, Quill’s and others, including six women and two boys. It was raining, in sheets behind a warm west wind, so you sweated amid the drenching. We herded the prisoners into stock pens. Another Mytilenean, not Quill but a confederate, appeared with our instructions. We were to put the detainees to death.
    How, I ask, are such orders to be carried out? Not philosophically but practically. Who steps forth to propose the means? Not the best, I assure you. Incinerate them, cried one of our rear rank; seal them in the barn and torch it. Another wished to butcher them like sheep. I refused the order in its entirety.
    Quill’s abettor confronted me. Who had bribed me? Did I know I was a traitor?
    I was young; outrage overcame me. “How will I command these?” I exclaimed, indicating my men. “How may I call them to soldierly duty after they have committed such atrocities? They will be ruined!”
    Quill appeared. These are the enemy, he cried, indicating the wretches in the sheepfold.
    Kill them yourself, I told him.
    He thrust the list in my face. “I’m putting your name on it!”
    My own hot temper was all that saved me as, seizing his board and scribing the mark with my own hand, this action so maddened my antagonist as to make him assault me bodily, the ensuing uproar overthrowing momentarily the impetus to mass murder. Yet let me not stylemyself deliverer. The poor devils were massacred next day by another company and I, busted to private soldier, shipped off again to the North.
    The years passed as if being lived by another. I glance back upon enlistments and discharges, pay vouchers and correspondence, bronzeheads extracted from my own flesh and cached as souvenirs at the bottom of my pack; I dig out trinkets and mementos, the names of men and women, lovers indeed, jotted upon the felt of my helmet cawl and scratched with a blade edge into the straps of my rucksack. I remember none.
    The season transited as in a single night, that species of slumber from which one awakens at intervals, fitful and feverish, and can reclaim by morning nothing save the sour smell of his own tortured bedding. It seemed I came to myself again before Potidaea, besieging the place a second time seven years after the first. I cannot say now if it was dream or real.
    For two winters after my wife’s death, I felt no call to passion. This was neither virtue nor grief, only despair. Then one night I entered the whores’ camp and never left. You understand the reckoning of accounts, my friend. Tote this up for me. How much in wages, and don’t fail to include mustering bonuses and dividends of discharge, may a soldier accrue who remains upon campaign, retiring not even in winter except to recover from wounds, for a decade entire? A tidy sum, I’d imagine. Enough to buy a handsome little farm, with stock and hands and even a comely wife.
    I fucked away every farthing. Screwed it or drank it, and in the end could not credit even my own recall that I had once harbored aspirations for myself.
    Peace came, the so-called Peace of Nicias, whereunder both sides, exhausted from years of strife, contracted to retire until they could recover breath, scratching in the interval lines beyond which each vowed not to trespass. I came home. Alcibiades was thirty now, elected to the chief executive of the state, the Board of Ten Generals, the same post