This is the war. It is not the risk of dying, not the red firework display of a bursting shell that blinds us as it comes whizzing down..., but the feeling of being a puppet in the hands of an unknown puppeteer—and that feeling sometimes chills the heart as if death itself had taken hold of it.
~Paolo Monelli, from 'The Beauty and the Sorrow' by Peter Englund, p. 201