We have had supper and my wife and I are sitting on our porch. It will not be dark for an hour yet and my wife has brought out some sewing. It is pink and full of lace and it is something she is making for a friend of hers who is going to be married soon.

All about us are our neighbors, sprinkling their lawns, or sitting on their porches, as we are doing. Occasionally my wife and I speak to some friend who passes, and bows, or stops to chat for a moment, but mostly we sit silent....

I am still thinking of the book which I have just completed. I say to myself: "I have finished my book at last, but I wonder if I have done what I set out to do?"

Then I think: "This book started out to be a record of my own company, but I do not want it to be that, now. I want it to be a record of every company in every army. If its cast and its overtones are American, that is only because the American scene is the one that I know. With different names and different settings, the men of whom I have written could, as easily, be French, German, English, or Russian for that matter."

I think: "I wish there were some way to take these stories and pin them to a huge wheel, each story hung on a different peg until the circle was completed. Then I would like to spin the wheel, faster and faster, until the things of which I have written took life and were recreated, and became part of the whole, flowing toward each other, and into each other; blurring, and then blending together into a composite whole, an unending cycle of pain.... That would be the picture of war. And the sound that the wheel made, and the sound that the men themselves made as they laughed, cried, cursed or prayed, would be, against the falling of walls, the rushing of bullets, the exploding of shells, the wound that war, itself makes...."

We had been silents for a long time, and then my wife spoke: "I'd take out the part about shooting prisoners."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it is cruel and unjust to shoot defenseless men in cold blood. It may have been done a few times, I'm not denying that, but it isn't typical. It couldn't have happened often."

"Would a description of an air raid be better?" I asked. "Would that be more humane? Would that be more typical?"

"Yes," she said. "Yes. That happened many times, I understand."

"Is it crueler, then, for Captain Matlock to order prisoners shot, because he was merely stupid, and through the circumstances warranted that, than for an aviator to bomb a town and kill harmless people who are not even fighting him?"

"That isn't as revolting as shooting prisoners."