Pretty Words

From Brave Men: “I’ve written many times that war isn’t romantic to the people in it. But there in that plane, all of a sudden, things did seem romantic. A heavy darkness had come inside the cabin. Passengers were indistinct shapes, kneeling at the windows — to absorb the spell of the hour. The remnants of the sun streaked the cloud-banked horizon ahead, making it vividly red and savagely beautiful. We were high, and the motors throbbed in a timeless rhythm. Below us were the green peaks of the Atlas Mountains, lovely in the softening shroud of the dusk. Villages with red roofs nestled on the peaktops. Down below lived sheep men — obscure mountain men who had never heard of a ‘Nevelwerfer’ or a bazooka, men at home at the end of the day in the poor, narrow, beautiful security of their own walls. And there high in the sky above and yet a part of it all were plain Americans incongruously away from home. For a moment it seemed terribly dramatic that we should be there at all amid that darkening beauty so far away, so foreign, so old. It was one of those moments impossible to transmit to another mind. A moment of overpowering beauty, of the surge of a marching world, of the relentlessness of our own fate. It made me want to cry.”