![]() ![]() They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up - take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now." Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony - forgive me, comrade how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother, just like Kat and Albert. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. ![]() But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. So I speak to him and say to him: "Comrade, I did not want to kill you. For there persists an ever present threat of the remnants of the Royalist armies, desperately foraging for food, horses and supplies." However, his influence is confined largely to the Eastern Sector of the country: East Anglia, which is held firmly in Cromwell's grasp, but not so firmly that Roundhead cavalry patrols have everything their way. In a time where the superstitions of country folk are still a powerful factor, Hopkins preys upon them, torturing and killing in a supposed drive to eliminate witchcraft from the country, and doing so with the full blessing of what law there is. An atmosphere in which the unscrupulous revel, and the likes of Matthew Hopkins take full advantage of the situation. Local Magistrates indulge their individual whims, justice and injustice are dispensed in more or less equal quantities, without opposition. The structure of law and order has collapsed. On the one side stand the Royalist party of King Charles, on the other, Cromwell's Parliamentary party: the Roundheads. "The year is 1645, England is in the grip of bloody civil war. And sometimes I wake up and I don't know where I am. the guy's fuckin' insides keep coming out! And nobody would help! Nobody would help! He's saying, sayin' "I wanna go home! I wanna go home!" He keeps calling my name! "I wanna go home, Johnny! I wanna drive my Chevy!" I said "With what? I can't find your fuckin' legs! I can't find your legs!" I can't get it out of my head. like this, and I'm tryin' to pull him off, you know, my friend that's all over me! I've got blood and everything and I'm tryin' to hold him together! I'm puttin'. And he's laying there, he's fucking screaming. He kept askin', yeah, and Joey said "Yeah." And I went to get a couple of beers, and the box was wired, and he opened up the box, fucking blew his body all over the place. And he says "Shine, please, shine!" I said no. We were in this bar in Saigon and this kid comes up, this kid carrying a shoe-shine box. ![]() Sylvia: Did you learn nothing about war at your university? Sylvia: Have you ever found the crushed bodies of your parents and siblings in a pile of rubble that used to be your home? Have you ever discovered a blown-off piece of your lover stuck to a wall? Have you ever been so hungry you tried to eat tree bark? Have you ever stewed human flesh in a pot? Have you ever convinced yourself your enemy was sub-human so you could slaughter them like animals? Have you ever been so haunted by shame and regret afterward that you cried until you puked? Have you ever had friends who did the same, and took their own lives? Terrorist: What are you going on about, lady? Sylvia: Have you ever heard the sound of bones shattering? Have you ever smelled the reek of rotting flesh? Sylvia: Have you ever had a limb torn off by an artillery shell? ![]() Sylvia: Have any of you ever killed anyone before? Have you ever been killed before? ![]()
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