Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story? - Robert Charles Wilson

This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.

It was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat gaze of a video screen.

Cassie had seen pictures in textbooks, of ranks of men in brown uniforms with rifles slung over their shoulders: the Allied Expeditionary Force, off to join the battered Brits and French. And pictures of the muddy European trenches: Ypres, Passchendaele, the Marne, where countless young men had been slaughtered by other young men as bewildered and obedient as themselves.