She hadn’t forgotten all her military training; one point she certainly recalled being taught was that anything that looked like an outrageous coinci… - Iain Banks

The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.

Muddle, confusion, stupidity, insane waste, pointless pain, misery and mass death—all the usual stuff of war, affecting him as it might affect anybody else, without any necessary moral reason, without any justice and even without any vindictiveness, just through the ghastly, banal working out of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, orbital mechanics and the shared nature of sentient beings existing and contending.

Sometimes what goes without saying is best said anyway.