Just Living. Blood in the Throat

Once, I read words saying that if old military songs make the hair on our backs stand up, if, stopping and getting out of the car, we read the inscription on a memorial and feel a lump in our throat—then we were reading the right books and we love our Motherland no matter what. We are the ones always ready to stand shoulder to shoulder—with our fathers and grandfathers.

There are no miracles in war. War is very hard and filthy work. It grinds people down like grains in a millstone. But those grains are also the abrasive that breaks war’s backbone.