January 25, 1798
Compare Wordsworth's "A Night-Piece", lines 1-16 http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww123.html.
Diaries
“The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the gray-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass?
Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.”
Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Two (pp. 50-51).
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Iain Banks 139
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