Tim Butcher's Blog
July 25, 2020
Update: audiobook of Chasing The Devil
The audiobook of Chasing the Devil is now available online once again, links below.
Much thanks to the many GoodReads members who reached out to let me know it had `vanished'. A rights glitch caused a temporary disappearance but that has now been sorted. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Happy Listening! TimB
or
Much thanks to the many GoodReads members who reached out to let me know it had `vanished'. A rights glitch caused a temporary disappearance but that has now been sorted. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Happy Listening! TimB
or
January 28, 2015
A Moving Discovery
What a discovery I made in a book by Laurie Lee. One reads so much about war, one knows how clearly it has been framed by filmmakers, poets and many others, that I rather felt it a topic that can no longer move me afresh.
Yet deep in Lee's `A Moment of War', his memoir about taking part in the Spanish Civil War in 1937/8 was this. No grandstanding, no chest puffing, no swagger, just searing honesty about the mucky process of taking a life in combat.
`I headed for the old barn where I'd spent my first night. I lay in a state of sick paralysis. I had killed a man, and remembered his shocked, angry eyes. There was nothing I could say to him now. Tanks rattled by and cries receded. I began to have hallucinations and breaks in the brain. I lay there knowing neither time nor place.....Was this then what I had come for, and all my journey had meant - to smudge out the life of an unknown young man in a blur of panic which in no way could affect victory or defeat?'
Jihadists, would-be American Snipers, cadets, soldiers, patriots: read these words and think, that when all is done it might just come down to `smudging out a life in a blur of panic'.
Yet deep in Lee's `A Moment of War', his memoir about taking part in the Spanish Civil War in 1937/8 was this. No grandstanding, no chest puffing, no swagger, just searing honesty about the mucky process of taking a life in combat.
`I headed for the old barn where I'd spent my first night. I lay in a state of sick paralysis. I had killed a man, and remembered his shocked, angry eyes. There was nothing I could say to him now. Tanks rattled by and cries receded. I began to have hallucinations and breaks in the brain. I lay there knowing neither time nor place.....Was this then what I had come for, and all my journey had meant - to smudge out the life of an unknown young man in a blur of panic which in no way could affect victory or defeat?'
Jihadists, would-be American Snipers, cadets, soldiers, patriots: read these words and think, that when all is done it might just come down to `smudging out a life in a blur of panic'.
