He worked it out on a ridge above a valley that was on fire from one end to the other, and none of the fire was his and none of it was the enemy's either, because there was no longer a clean way to say who had started any particular part of it.
The war had stopped being about the war.
Nobody down there was fighting for the valley. Nobody was fighting for grain, or a road, or a border, or a king. Every single thing happening below him was happening because of what the other side had done last, and the thing the other side had done last had happened because of what his side had done before that, and it went back and back and he could not find the beginning of it anymore.
And the red was thicker than he had ever seen it.
Not on him. In the ground. In the stone of the ridge under his boots, in the cracks in the road below, in the burnt terraces on both sides of the valley — a dull sullen glow down under everything, everywhere the cycle had been running longest.
