from an abandoned project
Jun. 1st, 2010 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbMine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
Suddenly the very colour of the morning was changed. An army, a vile and immense army, still filled the Strath Hog between the Hill of Hogwarts and the ridge of Beinn-na-Rig and Beinn Dhu. It polluted Hogsmeade and the fields where wizard children – some of them now part of that murderous host – once played and sang. But the horde now was as if between hammer and anvil, between the enormous and unconquered crag of the castle, and the steadily advancing waves of Dark Elves and Zabini allies. The mountains were black with advancing sorcerers and Elves; one could almost feel them shake under the tramp of their feet – and always, always the singing, from Hogwarts to the mountain, from the mountainside to Hogwarts, as if songs were the special language of the forces of Light. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
And another thing was happening. The appearance of the Zabini-Elvish host on the heights of Beinn-na-Rig had been known around the wizarding world almost as soon as it happened; and it had changed the whole feeling of the matter. In the last few months, wizards all over the Earth had become aware of the epoch-making crisis taking place in Britain; and the more they knew, the more desperate things seemed. Each news from the besieged island showed the Dark Lord’s party more in the ascendant, not only winning battles, but gaining positions and power, isolating the forces of light and corrupting or ripping them to pieces one by one. Most European ministries were known to be penetrated by his adherents or eager to come to an accommodation with him; they formed a formidable outer shield for the Dark Lord’s assault on Merlin’s island, an obstacle and a threat to any outside forces that wished to intervene. It seemed only a matter of time before the last effective fortress, Hogwarts, would be surrounded and overwhelmed.
I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damp.
I have read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.
But now that that moment had come, the whole balance of forces had changed with no warning. Out of nowhere, by secret ways that no Ministry seemed to know or control, a host of mighty immortals and of one of the most powerful wizarding clans in Europe had appeared on the battlefield. Now this was a battle, a struggle, rather than the last stage in a planned and foreseen annihilation. From one end of the world to the other, and even in place outside the Earth where wizards lived or attention was paid to their affairs, despair lifted like morning mist in the sun.
I have read a righteous Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
As you deal with My contemners, so with you My Grace shall deal.
Only a small minority of the wizarding world, even so, would consider taking a hand in the matter; but a small minority still made large hosts. Let the Hero born of woman crush the serpent with His heel.
First to appear on the mountainside, as the Zabinis were still forming, were a couple of hundred Indian magicians under the unofficial leadership of Samjukta Gupta of Calcutta, bearing the three-coloured flag of their nation; not only a large number, but powerful, since the subcontinent is rich in talented wizards. Then the Apparation waves started to multiply, first a few in succession, then many, then dozens in seconds, as small groups of magically powerful individuals from all over the world followed the path of previous incomers to Apparate in turn. Many defiantly waved the colours of their countries, from the three hundred and more who swiftly gathered under the Stars and Stripes, to the single valiant black man bearing high the flag of Montserrat in the Caribbean that the enemy might see. Glory, glory, Halleluyah! No less than twenty priests, monks and nuns appeared in their Catholic habits and vestments, under the white-and-gold of the Vatican, wands at the ready and prepared to fight; their leader bore the staff of a Bishop and was the head of the secret Mercedarian Academy, where wizarding people of the Catholic faith were educated. His Truth is marching on. One blonde young woman, freshly graduated from Beauxbatons, appeared without a flag; observing what was going on, she snapped her fingers and conjured the colours of the Principality of Monaco. A bunch of wizards who had isolated themselves from the rest of mankind decades before appeared on the battlefield bearing a black flag with the outline of Antarctica in icy white. Fighters came from Bhutan, Haiti, Lesotho, Bolivia, San Marino. Soon what had been the Zabini side of the battlefront was a forest of banners of all the colours of the rainbow, each of them taken there by an individual man or woman to show that in the face of official corruption and fear, the soul of their nations was where fighting went on. The world was rising up against fear and murder.
He hath loosed the dreadful lightning of His terrible swift sword.
Then as the gathering volunteer ranks began to stride down, two tremendous waves of Apparation power silenced foe and friend alike for a second. A whole wizarding army suddenly was standing next to the forming battle-line, bearing a flag with two crossed silver wands for Beauxbatons; then a second one appeared even further left, bearing a black eagle on white, the dreaded battle flag of Durmstrang. And still the singing went on, guided by the instruments of the Dark Elf Lords of Music, filling the valley from one end to the other and making each fighter feel as if the air itself were marching with them down to war. It reached out across the lines, as opponents moved out to meet across an increasingly small amount of no-man’s-land; it altered the sense of space and light, placing a spring in the step of the Dark Lord’s enemies, racing across their nerves and their muscles as they walked down to meet the ugly colours of their foes. Glory, glory, Hallelujah, His truth is marching on!
But it was no fool or weakling who faced them. It was no common enemy who stood at the centre of his hosts like a pillar, a very spider of evil at the centre of all his web of contrivances, perceiving, examining, reacting, certain of a power he had spent years upon years to build. The instant between surprise and reaction was shorter, and the power deployed in response greater, in Voldemort, than in any Dark Lord who had arisen for centuries. The dreadful things he had inflicted on himself had, among other things, had the effect of making him a fighting machine, ay, and a thinking machine too; with less feeling, less fear, less sense of personality and vulnerability, than almost any tyrant. No sooner had the lines of Elves and Italians started to materialize on the peaks of Beinn-na-Rig, that an imperious mental command had gone out to Lucius Malfoy, and beneath him to some four hundred higher and lesser commander; and a whole line of the black hosts had switched motion, swinging in one screaming motion outwards and eastwards to the mountain ridge. Voldemort’s armies came as a rout of howling individuals, racing up the slopes, screaming and screeching in an attempt to silence the music. Individuals or small groups ran so far ahead of the rest that wands and swords cut them down; but the black army was rising up the mountains like a tide.
They howled and shouted; but they did not sing. Songs in praise of Voldemort, of course, had been sung at meetings of the elite, and poems had been recited; but there was no sense that a belief was to be stirred in the hearts of their soldiers, that there was any advantage in light and hope and joy. The soldiers would fight because they loved to; because they hated the enemy; because rage and the breaking of bones and the spurting of blood were good, were orgasmically joyful and satisfying to them. The least of them would fight for the glory of his ultimate master, because it was in that glory that he or she had cast his or her sense of self-love; not that the Dark Lord did anything but trample on them as on grass, but that the Dark Lord was great, and they were His servants, was what mattered to them. The common fighters, even those who were not demons or enslaved magical creatures, wore no uniform; each of them bore what seemed best to him or her to frighten and impress the enemy – and it was strange how all these separate imagination had fixed on dark, ugly, muddy colours, occasionally slashed by flashes of violent electric pink or blue. The colours of Voldemort’s front line were mud shot though here and there with delirium.
The common leaders and lesser Death Eaters stood several ranks behind the front line, to observe the behaviour of their troops – who felt their eyes on them all the time, a Persian lash to encourage them to perform, and above all not to slacken. The troops did not know, either, how many of their neighbours, next to them in line, fighting side by side, were held by the Imperius curse rather than there of their own will; but those of them whose mind was still in that sense their own knew this, that they could not rely on any comrade to rebel against any leader, or to assert themselves, because any one of them might be cursed. Knowledge of the Imperius curse was widespread among officer ranks, and it was said that very many of them were subject to it as well. The ranks feared their own more than the enemy; and they were quite willing to spill enemy blood to prove their own loyalty. Death Eaters had grown greatly in numbers in the last few months, as the victory of the Dark Lord had come to feel inevitable, and as a result a division in ranks had become visible. The lesser figures, and those whose wealth and position did not place them highly enough, or who did not enjoy, like Peter Pettigrew, the contemptuous favour of the Dark Lord, were no more than subalterns, charged with taking and executing orders, awarded small rewards for their deeds – rule over a small company here, the murder of an old rival there. They felt themselves called to higher things, and, conscious that advancement was difficult and competitive, regarded all their fellow-subalterns with hate born of the fear that they might be beaten in something; the higher-ranking with cringing servility that disguised a burning desire to replace them; and the Dark Lord with utter submission, as the source of all their power. Now they were all busy herding their troops to the front and to the killing ground; but the Dark Lord knew that he had in them, should he ever need them, a formidable mass of potential destroyers for any Death Eater who got too big for his boots, failed in a task, or made himself unpopular with him. And while he did not often feel the need to use them, he had done so a couple of times already.
The Dark Lord ruled his followers, even the greatest and mightiest among them, with a rod of iron. He knew, and had even told them so, that if he were not absolute among them, they would simply rip each other apart in their contention for power; therefore there was no alternative to complete and unmixed loyalty to him. None of his immediate followers doubted his word on this, because it was more or less what they themselves would have done in his place; and none of his followers wanted to be left out of the final share of the loot, let alone fall under his frown. Some followed him out of a strange loyalty, a sense that his greatness somehow communicated itself to his followers; some out of cold self-interest, a desire either to preserve their and their family’s position in the wizarding world, or to rise in it on the back of his success; some out of hatred for his enemies, or belief that the things he wanted to destroy ought to be destroyed; and some had so far deluded themselves as to believe that his rule would bring about a desirable state of society. But all had been beaten into absolute loyalty, not only by the fear of death – for murder in the open or in secret was only the last resort open to him. They knew that they could suffer public degradation or private torture, be moved outwards from his presence, be humiliated in front of their enemies; and one thing was sure – everyone who belonged to the inner circle had his share of enemies. This was one of the things Severus Snape had used to worm his way into it for so long, allowing the Dark Lord to perceive his perfectly genuine loathing and jealousy of several Death Eaters.
From the centre of the Dark Throne, death and terror flowed outwards, modulated and amplified by each of the human instruments on which Voldemort played. His own awareness flowed out with his influence, through the eyes of his greater servants, and then of the lesser, to take in the form of all his plans and policies across Britain and Europe; and with increasing control, the more they were gathered together – till they were an army under his direct command, gathered for the annihilation of the only power centre in the great island that had refused both compromise and corruption.
Hogwarts must fall. Every member of the Dark Lord’s party knew this, and most of them had grown in anger and desire to destroy with every act of defiance, every refusal to negotiate, every plain challenge to the Dark Lord, coming from the doomed fortress. Each member of the Dark Army had surrendered his or her soul, polluted his or her will, sinned against his or her own self; and as they had sold and sacrificed their integrity, they hated the very idea that someone else would refuse to – that there was a place where people would not commit the same sin as they had. The poisonous obstinacy, the unreasoning rebellion of Hogwarts, must end. The spirit of the time had to triumph; archaic notion of loyalty, integrity, respect for law and love of country, must go down to the new world, to the new values. The resistance of those doomed braggarts, each of whose acts of defiance struck at each member of the Dark Party like a personal insult, must end; and if they refused to see reason, then they would have to see force.
Yet the battle-front of many colours kept coming down the mountain calmly, at an even marching pace. Five hundred metres separated the two masses – four hundred and fifty – four hundred; and the bones of the mountain echoed with their cadenced steps; every volunteer, every new unit, taking the cue from the rest, and from the music. Three hundred and fifty metres; three hundred; and the music went on, at one pace – the pace of one person. A single white-clad figure at the centre of the silver and black array of the Elves’ battle-line: the Queen of the Elves, her face streaked with tears, her teeth clenched – two hundred and fifty metres; two hundred – but holding her head high, her battle standard upright in her left hand and her wand steady in her right. One hundred and fifty. As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. Around her on every side marched her Elvish bodyguard, with all their magic focussed into their sheathless swords, silent and terrible (one hundred; and now she could see individual faces in the enemy lines, faces to kill or be killed by) moving down the mountainside in time to the song; and above them, led by Blaise Zabini on his winged white horse, flew thick flocks of mounted Elves on flying animals and wizards and witches on broomsticks, and they sang as they went.
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave;
He is wisdom to the mighty; He is succour to the brave;
So the Earth shall be His footstool, and the soul of time His slave.
Fifty metres. Twenty. Ten. And suddenly the two lines met, the brown and the many-coloured, all at once, came together, devouring the space between as though it had never been; with a howling storm of noises like the opening of Hell – a roar that nobody outside a battlefield has ever heard, and must pray never to hear. And yet still somewhere in that infernal storm of murderous sounds, of shrieks to rip earth from heaven and sanity from human eyes, still the marching music went on, at the very edges of hearing, like a secret thread wound through the fire and horror of war.
Suddenly the very colour of the morning was changed. An army, a vile and immense army, still filled the Strath Hog between the Hill of Hogwarts and the ridge of Beinn-na-Rig and Beinn Dhu. It polluted Hogsmeade and the fields where wizard children – some of them now part of that murderous host – once played and sang. But the horde now was as if between hammer and anvil, between the enormous and unconquered crag of the castle, and the steadily advancing waves of Dark Elves and Zabini allies. The mountains were black with advancing sorcerers and Elves; one could almost feel them shake under the tramp of their feet – and always, always the singing, from Hogwarts to the mountain, from the mountainside to Hogwarts, as if songs were the special language of the forces of Light. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
And another thing was happening. The appearance of the Zabini-Elvish host on the heights of Beinn-na-Rig had been known around the wizarding world almost as soon as it happened; and it had changed the whole feeling of the matter. In the last few months, wizards all over the Earth had become aware of the epoch-making crisis taking place in Britain; and the more they knew, the more desperate things seemed. Each news from the besieged island showed the Dark Lord’s party more in the ascendant, not only winning battles, but gaining positions and power, isolating the forces of light and corrupting or ripping them to pieces one by one. Most European ministries were known to be penetrated by his adherents or eager to come to an accommodation with him; they formed a formidable outer shield for the Dark Lord’s assault on Merlin’s island, an obstacle and a threat to any outside forces that wished to intervene. It seemed only a matter of time before the last effective fortress, Hogwarts, would be surrounded and overwhelmed.
I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damp.
I have read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.
But now that that moment had come, the whole balance of forces had changed with no warning. Out of nowhere, by secret ways that no Ministry seemed to know or control, a host of mighty immortals and of one of the most powerful wizarding clans in Europe had appeared on the battlefield. Now this was a battle, a struggle, rather than the last stage in a planned and foreseen annihilation. From one end of the world to the other, and even in place outside the Earth where wizards lived or attention was paid to their affairs, despair lifted like morning mist in the sun.
I have read a righteous Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
As you deal with My contemners, so with you My Grace shall deal.
Only a small minority of the wizarding world, even so, would consider taking a hand in the matter; but a small minority still made large hosts. Let the Hero born of woman crush the serpent with His heel.
First to appear on the mountainside, as the Zabinis were still forming, were a couple of hundred Indian magicians under the unofficial leadership of Samjukta Gupta of Calcutta, bearing the three-coloured flag of their nation; not only a large number, but powerful, since the subcontinent is rich in talented wizards. Then the Apparation waves started to multiply, first a few in succession, then many, then dozens in seconds, as small groups of magically powerful individuals from all over the world followed the path of previous incomers to Apparate in turn. Many defiantly waved the colours of their countries, from the three hundred and more who swiftly gathered under the Stars and Stripes, to the single valiant black man bearing high the flag of Montserrat in the Caribbean that the enemy might see. Glory, glory, Halleluyah! No less than twenty priests, monks and nuns appeared in their Catholic habits and vestments, under the white-and-gold of the Vatican, wands at the ready and prepared to fight; their leader bore the staff of a Bishop and was the head of the secret Mercedarian Academy, where wizarding people of the Catholic faith were educated. His Truth is marching on. One blonde young woman, freshly graduated from Beauxbatons, appeared without a flag; observing what was going on, she snapped her fingers and conjured the colours of the Principality of Monaco. A bunch of wizards who had isolated themselves from the rest of mankind decades before appeared on the battlefield bearing a black flag with the outline of Antarctica in icy white. Fighters came from Bhutan, Haiti, Lesotho, Bolivia, San Marino. Soon what had been the Zabini side of the battlefront was a forest of banners of all the colours of the rainbow, each of them taken there by an individual man or woman to show that in the face of official corruption and fear, the soul of their nations was where fighting went on. The world was rising up against fear and murder.
He hath loosed the dreadful lightning of His terrible swift sword.
Then as the gathering volunteer ranks began to stride down, two tremendous waves of Apparation power silenced foe and friend alike for a second. A whole wizarding army suddenly was standing next to the forming battle-line, bearing a flag with two crossed silver wands for Beauxbatons; then a second one appeared even further left, bearing a black eagle on white, the dreaded battle flag of Durmstrang. And still the singing went on, guided by the instruments of the Dark Elf Lords of Music, filling the valley from one end to the other and making each fighter feel as if the air itself were marching with them down to war. It reached out across the lines, as opponents moved out to meet across an increasingly small amount of no-man’s-land; it altered the sense of space and light, placing a spring in the step of the Dark Lord’s enemies, racing across their nerves and their muscles as they walked down to meet the ugly colours of their foes. Glory, glory, Hallelujah, His truth is marching on!
But it was no fool or weakling who faced them. It was no common enemy who stood at the centre of his hosts like a pillar, a very spider of evil at the centre of all his web of contrivances, perceiving, examining, reacting, certain of a power he had spent years upon years to build. The instant between surprise and reaction was shorter, and the power deployed in response greater, in Voldemort, than in any Dark Lord who had arisen for centuries. The dreadful things he had inflicted on himself had, among other things, had the effect of making him a fighting machine, ay, and a thinking machine too; with less feeling, less fear, less sense of personality and vulnerability, than almost any tyrant. No sooner had the lines of Elves and Italians started to materialize on the peaks of Beinn-na-Rig, that an imperious mental command had gone out to Lucius Malfoy, and beneath him to some four hundred higher and lesser commander; and a whole line of the black hosts had switched motion, swinging in one screaming motion outwards and eastwards to the mountain ridge. Voldemort’s armies came as a rout of howling individuals, racing up the slopes, screaming and screeching in an attempt to silence the music. Individuals or small groups ran so far ahead of the rest that wands and swords cut them down; but the black army was rising up the mountains like a tide.
They howled and shouted; but they did not sing. Songs in praise of Voldemort, of course, had been sung at meetings of the elite, and poems had been recited; but there was no sense that a belief was to be stirred in the hearts of their soldiers, that there was any advantage in light and hope and joy. The soldiers would fight because they loved to; because they hated the enemy; because rage and the breaking of bones and the spurting of blood were good, were orgasmically joyful and satisfying to them. The least of them would fight for the glory of his ultimate master, because it was in that glory that he or she had cast his or her sense of self-love; not that the Dark Lord did anything but trample on them as on grass, but that the Dark Lord was great, and they were His servants, was what mattered to them. The common fighters, even those who were not demons or enslaved magical creatures, wore no uniform; each of them bore what seemed best to him or her to frighten and impress the enemy – and it was strange how all these separate imagination had fixed on dark, ugly, muddy colours, occasionally slashed by flashes of violent electric pink or blue. The colours of Voldemort’s front line were mud shot though here and there with delirium.
The common leaders and lesser Death Eaters stood several ranks behind the front line, to observe the behaviour of their troops – who felt their eyes on them all the time, a Persian lash to encourage them to perform, and above all not to slacken. The troops did not know, either, how many of their neighbours, next to them in line, fighting side by side, were held by the Imperius curse rather than there of their own will; but those of them whose mind was still in that sense their own knew this, that they could not rely on any comrade to rebel against any leader, or to assert themselves, because any one of them might be cursed. Knowledge of the Imperius curse was widespread among officer ranks, and it was said that very many of them were subject to it as well. The ranks feared their own more than the enemy; and they were quite willing to spill enemy blood to prove their own loyalty. Death Eaters had grown greatly in numbers in the last few months, as the victory of the Dark Lord had come to feel inevitable, and as a result a division in ranks had become visible. The lesser figures, and those whose wealth and position did not place them highly enough, or who did not enjoy, like Peter Pettigrew, the contemptuous favour of the Dark Lord, were no more than subalterns, charged with taking and executing orders, awarded small rewards for their deeds – rule over a small company here, the murder of an old rival there. They felt themselves called to higher things, and, conscious that advancement was difficult and competitive, regarded all their fellow-subalterns with hate born of the fear that they might be beaten in something; the higher-ranking with cringing servility that disguised a burning desire to replace them; and the Dark Lord with utter submission, as the source of all their power. Now they were all busy herding their troops to the front and to the killing ground; but the Dark Lord knew that he had in them, should he ever need them, a formidable mass of potential destroyers for any Death Eater who got too big for his boots, failed in a task, or made himself unpopular with him. And while he did not often feel the need to use them, he had done so a couple of times already.
The Dark Lord ruled his followers, even the greatest and mightiest among them, with a rod of iron. He knew, and had even told them so, that if he were not absolute among them, they would simply rip each other apart in their contention for power; therefore there was no alternative to complete and unmixed loyalty to him. None of his immediate followers doubted his word on this, because it was more or less what they themselves would have done in his place; and none of his followers wanted to be left out of the final share of the loot, let alone fall under his frown. Some followed him out of a strange loyalty, a sense that his greatness somehow communicated itself to his followers; some out of cold self-interest, a desire either to preserve their and their family’s position in the wizarding world, or to rise in it on the back of his success; some out of hatred for his enemies, or belief that the things he wanted to destroy ought to be destroyed; and some had so far deluded themselves as to believe that his rule would bring about a desirable state of society. But all had been beaten into absolute loyalty, not only by the fear of death – for murder in the open or in secret was only the last resort open to him. They knew that they could suffer public degradation or private torture, be moved outwards from his presence, be humiliated in front of their enemies; and one thing was sure – everyone who belonged to the inner circle had his share of enemies. This was one of the things Severus Snape had used to worm his way into it for so long, allowing the Dark Lord to perceive his perfectly genuine loathing and jealousy of several Death Eaters.
From the centre of the Dark Throne, death and terror flowed outwards, modulated and amplified by each of the human instruments on which Voldemort played. His own awareness flowed out with his influence, through the eyes of his greater servants, and then of the lesser, to take in the form of all his plans and policies across Britain and Europe; and with increasing control, the more they were gathered together – till they were an army under his direct command, gathered for the annihilation of the only power centre in the great island that had refused both compromise and corruption.
Hogwarts must fall. Every member of the Dark Lord’s party knew this, and most of them had grown in anger and desire to destroy with every act of defiance, every refusal to negotiate, every plain challenge to the Dark Lord, coming from the doomed fortress. Each member of the Dark Army had surrendered his or her soul, polluted his or her will, sinned against his or her own self; and as they had sold and sacrificed their integrity, they hated the very idea that someone else would refuse to – that there was a place where people would not commit the same sin as they had. The poisonous obstinacy, the unreasoning rebellion of Hogwarts, must end. The spirit of the time had to triumph; archaic notion of loyalty, integrity, respect for law and love of country, must go down to the new world, to the new values. The resistance of those doomed braggarts, each of whose acts of defiance struck at each member of the Dark Party like a personal insult, must end; and if they refused to see reason, then they would have to see force.
Yet the battle-front of many colours kept coming down the mountain calmly, at an even marching pace. Five hundred metres separated the two masses – four hundred and fifty – four hundred; and the bones of the mountain echoed with their cadenced steps; every volunteer, every new unit, taking the cue from the rest, and from the music. Three hundred and fifty metres; three hundred; and the music went on, at one pace – the pace of one person. A single white-clad figure at the centre of the silver and black array of the Elves’ battle-line: the Queen of the Elves, her face streaked with tears, her teeth clenched – two hundred and fifty metres; two hundred – but holding her head high, her battle standard upright in her left hand and her wand steady in her right. One hundred and fifty. As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. Around her on every side marched her Elvish bodyguard, with all their magic focussed into their sheathless swords, silent and terrible (one hundred; and now she could see individual faces in the enemy lines, faces to kill or be killed by) moving down the mountainside in time to the song; and above them, led by Blaise Zabini on his winged white horse, flew thick flocks of mounted Elves on flying animals and wizards and witches on broomsticks, and they sang as they went.
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave;
He is wisdom to the mighty; He is succour to the brave;
So the Earth shall be His footstool, and the soul of time His slave.
Fifty metres. Twenty. Ten. And suddenly the two lines met, the brown and the many-coloured, all at once, came together, devouring the space between as though it had never been; with a howling storm of noises like the opening of Hell – a roar that nobody outside a battlefield has ever heard, and must pray never to hear. And yet still somewhere in that infernal storm of murderous sounds, of shrieks to rip earth from heaven and sanity from human eyes, still the marching music went on, at the very edges of hearing, like a secret thread wound through the fire and horror of war.
