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we can't remember what it is about women that can turn a man through passion into something holy. Bible words again, but I am thinking of my father who shaded his eyes on those sunburnt evenings and learned to take his time with my mother. I am thinking of my mother with her noisy heart and of all the women waiting in the fields for the men who drowned yesterday and all the mothers' sons who have taken their place.
    We never think of them here. We think of their bodies and now and then we talk about home but we don't think of them as they are; the most solid, the best loved, the well known.
    They go on. Whatever we do or undo, they go on.
    There was a man in our village who liked to think of himself as an inventor. He spent a lot of time with pulleys and bits of rope and offcuts of wood making devices that could raise a cow or laying pipes to bring the river water right into the house. He was a man with light in his voice and an easy way with his neighbours. Used to disappointment, he could always assuage the disappointment in others. And in a village subject to the rain and sun there are many disappointments.
    All the while that he invented and re-invented and cheered us up, his wife, who never spoke except to say, 'Dinner's ready', worked in the fields and kept house and, because the man liked his bed, she was soon bringing up six children too.
    Once, he went to town for a few months to try and make his fortune and when he came back with no fortune and without their savings, she was sitting quiedy in a clean house mending clean clothes and the fields were planted for another year.
    You can tell I liked this man, and I'd be a fool to say he didn't work, that we didn't need him and his optimistic ways. But when she died, suddenly, at noon, the light went out of his voice and his pipes filled with mud and he could hardly harvest his land let alone bring up six children.
    She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god.
    Like God, she was neglected.
    New recruits cry when they come here and they think about their mothers and their sweethearts and they think about going home. They remember what it is about home that holds their hearts; not sentiment or show but faces they love. Most of these recruits aren't seventeen and they're asked to do in a few weeks what vexes the best philosophers for a lifetime; that is, to gather up their passion for life and make sense of it in the face of death.
    They don't know how but they do know how to forget, and little by little they put aside the burning summer in their bodies and all they have instead is lust and rage.
    It was after the disaster at sea that I started to keep a diary. I started so that I wouldn't forget. So that in later life when I was prone to sit by the fire and look back, I'd have something clear and sure to set against my memory tricks. I told Domino; he said, The way you see it now is no more real than the way you'll see it then.'
    I couldn't agree with him. I knew how old men blurred and lied making the past always the best because it was gone. Hadn't Bonaparte said so himself?
    'Look at you,' said Domino, 'a young man brought up by a priest and a pious mother. A young man who can't pick up a musket to shoot a rabbit. What makes you think you can see anything clearly? What gives you the right to make a notebook and shake it at me in thirty years, if we're still alive, and say you've got the truth?'
    'I don't care about the facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change, I want to remember that'
    He shrugged and left me. He never talked about the future and only occasionally, when drunk, would he talk about his marvellous past A past filled with sequined women and double- tailed horses and a father who made his living being fired from a cannon. He came from somewhere in eastern Europe and his skin was the colour of old olives. We only knew he had wandered into France by mistake, years ago, and saved the lady Josephine from the hooves of a runaway