“What of the hundreds of faceless men on the streets looking for work, trying to pick up the threads of family life, hoping that the dying had made a better Britain, and finding they were lost in it. Faceless men…People stepped around them now, ignored the brave boy who’d marched away to glory and now begged on the street because a one-armed man couldn’t work. He thought sometimes, in the dark corners of his mind, that the dead were the lucky ones. They hadn’t been disillusioned.”

“Now he realized that somehow those who had served in France and elsewhere knew a world that couldn’t be shared. How could he tell his sister—or even his father, if the elder Rutledge was still alive—what had been done on bloody ground far from home? It would be criminal to fill their minds with scenes that no one should have to remember. No one.”

“But what kind of love? It had so many faces, so many names. Jealousy wove a thread around it, and envy, and fear. People died for love–and killed for it. And yet in itself it was indefinable, it wore whatever passions people brought to it, like a mountebank, with no reality of its own.”

“That's the point of working with one's hands, you see. It gives the mind something else to do besides worry.”

“Children were quick to grasp the subtleties of emotions around them, to see through evasions and quickly identify prevarication.”

“Tell me something. Why is everyone so determined to believe Wilton is innocent?"Surprised, Davies said, "He's a war hero isn't he? Admired by the King and a friend of the Prince of Wales. He's visited Sandringham, been received by Queen Mary herself! A man like that doesn’t go around killing people!"With a wry downturn of his lips, Rutledge silently asked, How did he win his medals, you fool, if not by being so very damned good at killing?”

“We walked away from all that was warm and dear and stood frightened in cold rain where the guns fired, and in the end, we died in pain, the black stinking mud our shroud, embraced at last not by living arms, but by the bones of those who before us died …”