Desolation. Rubble, fragments of plastered wall, broken rafters, the yellow splashes of lyddite everywhere, The drizzle that had started again gleaming on the stones. On the skin of corpses. Many Germans had been caught in the houses. In ten minutes I saw a summary of the whole butcher’s shop of war. The blood, the gaping holes, the bone sticking out of flesh, the stench of burst intestines – I am telling you this only because the effect on me, a boy who had never seen even a peacefully dead body before that day, was one that I should never had predicted. It was not nausea and terror. I saw several men being sick. But I was not. It was an intense new conviction. Nothing could justify this. It was a thousand times better England should be a Prussian colony. One reads that such scenes give the green soldier nothing but a mad lust to kill in his turn. But I had exactly the contrary feeling. I had a mad lust not to be killed.
John Fowles, “The Magus”, 1977.
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