Status Updates From The Door in the Hedge

Again the soldier thought of the King’s musicians playing gallantly to hide the silence of their master and his daughters. Yet there one listened to the music because one could hear the sorrow behind it that it sought to conceal, even to soften. Here, to listen carefully to what lay behind the music was to court madness,for what lay behind it was empitness of the void.

But the stiffness was not so much that of the muscles as of the mind: the reluctance to rise and look upon yesterday’s battlefield; to look upon the faces of those who had been your friends and had been killed, and upon those belonging to the other side, whom you and your friends had killed. And upon those of that other army who returned in the morning to bury their dead,their living faces as stiff as your own.