I am listening to this scene for the sixth or seventh time. After six books of life and war at the end of the Bronze Age, after the victory at Platea that all but ended the Greco-Persian Wars, some Hellene warriors are pondering what their lives will be like after what they believe to be their last battle (the upcoming Battle of Mycale).
> Sittonax leaned forwards. He was never the best spoken, as Greek was not his language. And he was taciturn, when there were no women to impress.
> But he leaned forwards and took the mastos of wine, and drank, and handed it on to Sekla. ‘I think you are all fools,’ he said kindly. ‘Here, you are brothers. This is the best life any man can know. Every day, we face death. This war has forged us all. We can do anything. What will trade with Aegypt be, when we have warred down Persia? Look at this ship. I am no sailor, but this is the best ship I have ever seen. Why? Because every man aboard trusts every other. Storm, and battle, disease, and wine; every man aboard knows the others as he knows himself. And you would shatter this with peace? So that every man can go his own way? And starve and weep, alone, without the comrades of his youth?’
> It was the longest speech I’d ever heard from Sittonax, except to induce a maiden to succumb to his charms.
> Men looked at each other.
> ‘As for me, Sittonax, I’d ask the gods nothing more than this last forever: the stars in the sky, my comrades around me, the wine. The eve of the last battle. Is this the afterlife? I ask no more.’
> There was a silence.
> Brasidas laughed. ‘Sittonax, you are a philosopher, and all this time I thought you were a sword arm attached to a dick.’
> Many of them had never heard the Spartan speak so coarsely, and they all laughed.
> Brasidas poured a libation over the side. ‘I am the wrong man to argue against you. That is the life that I wanted; the life I sought, until some man’s spear put me in the dust.’ He looked at me in the flickering lamplight. ‘But I say there are other joys than battle, and other comrades than men. I say that I have made enough war for any man’s life, and I will go to Plataea, and build a house, and take a wife, and learn about sheep and pigs, and be happy. And I say to you, Sittonax: you have stood at my shoulder fifty times. Come and build a house next to mine and Leukas’, and we will grow old, and tell lies about what heroes we were.’
> ‘We are heroes!’ Sittonax growled.
> ‘All the more reason to lie,’ Leukas said. ‘Only we can handle the truth, anyway.’
I never served in the military. Maybe I misunderstand this passage. But if I do, I’m not sure I want to be corrected.
Sittonax is saying he doesn’t want this to end. That the camaraderie, the connection, the bond, the friendship, is the greatest feeling he has ever known. And all the men know he says this, and they all agree, in whole or in part. They never want it to end, but the hell that is fighting must end. Only through Brasidas’ humor can they deal with that feeling.
Then Brasidas gives him another way to look at it. Says that he can have both. That connection and peace. And they’ll always be able to talk to each other in the way that only men who have served together can, because only they understand what it was like, what it is like, what that bond is and means, what those experiences are.
I read a lot of military and historical fiction. I don’t read it for the battles or the combat. I am so very over stories that are nothing but “this happens then that happens”. I read for the characters and what those experiences mean to them, how it shapes them, how they handle war.
I never served. I’ve never been where they are, in any way. I don’t really understand it. I never can.
But I feel it. I feel it in a way that no one could describe to me or tell me about. But six books of stories and people that act, as far as I can tell, the way human beings really would, makes me feel it. Makes me understand it in some partial way.
That’s the miracle of a story. That’s what literature is. That’s why I’m bawling my eyes out as I write this.
by Kardinal