Surely you admit, despite looking away so discreetly from the details of my infamy, that I was not sent to Canada to participate in some sort of benevolent exercise…

Only English civility could save the New World from Spanish barbarity or French foppery or Indians burning us alive piece by piece. England sired the only people by whom real kindness might rule overseas: I don’t mean to question that…but before that happened, we had to win. I was not sent over the sea to assuage or cooperate.

How long scalped Canadians caterwaul depends on how much blood they lose before you peel ’em. I’ve seen a yowl fit to wake the Duke of Cumberland’s dead father rise out of a completely skinned head. Sound travels slower than death.

For all this, I’m grateful I never had youngsters. After scalping Canadians my men woke camp at night with their own howls, dreaming of their bairns thus slaughtered. It’s funny how the mind misplaces circumstances at night. My father was never more right in his head than when he used claret to put himself to sleep. The problem is deciding how much to drink without impairing your judgment the next morning. That difficult balance was one of the reasons I begged my superiors to make me second, not first, in command.

There’s a gap at the head of things, always wanting to be filled, and I never asked to fill it.

Clarity has always been an attribute of mine, against my wishes. Because of it I have been entrusted with too much. Clarity sounds like claret, but hasn’t nearly the same power of tonic for the mind.

—

HOW YOU SET FIRE to a farmstead after a fortnight of August rain is that you ignite hay in the barn, then light pathetic sideboards nailed from packing crates and balsam till the tar drips. You fling this abroad in drafty rooms till flankers engulf the curtains and bedding already windburnt from hanging on clotheslines over the turnip rows.

There’s clarity, there’s claret, and there’s bed. I don’t talk about the times I had to take to my bed. Some beds, beds in every camp I’ve known, aren’t worth the name—rats’ nests made by turning round and round in a patch of stones.

Twice in my soldiering life I’ve had to take to my bed not for the gravels, not for dysentery, not for bladder-stones that’ve doubled me over so often—these ailments I can work through: they’re only discomforts, though twice they accompanied my greater ailment, the one a successful soldier conceals, the one I have concealed to this day.