They both bore it as though in deliberate flagellant exaltation of physical misery transmogrified into the spirits’ travail of the two young mend during that time fifty years ago, or forty-eight rather, then forty-seven and then forty-six, since it was ’64 and then ’65 and the starved and ragged remnant of an army having retreated across Alabama and Georgia and into Carolina swept onward not by a victorious army behind it but rather by a mounting tide of the names of lost battles from either side — Chickamauga and Franklin, Vicksburg and Corinth and Atlanta — battles lost not alone because of superior numbers and failing ammunition and stores, but because of generals who should not have been generals, who were generals no through training in contemporary methods or aptitude for learning them, but by the divine right to say ‘Go there’ conferred upon them by an absolute caste system; or because the generals of it never lived long enough to learn how to fight masse cautious accretionary battles, since they were already as obsolete as Richard or Roland or du Guesclin, who wore plumes and cloaks lined with scarlet at twenty-eight and thirty and thirty-two and captured warships with cavalry charges but no grain nor meat nor bullets, who would whip three seperate armies in as many days and then tear down their own fences to cook meat robbed from their own smokehouses, who on one night and with a handful of men would gallantly set fire to and destroy a million dollar garrison of enemy supplies and on the next night be discovered by a neighbor in bed with his wife and be shot to death; –two, four, now two again, according to Quentin and Shreve, the two the four the two still talking — the one who did not yet know what he was going to do, the other who knew what he would have to do yet could not reconcile himself – Henry citing himself authority for incest, talking about his Duek John of Lorraine as if he hoped possibly to evoke that condemned and excommunicated shade to tell him in person that it was all right, as people both before and since have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon; –the two the four thw two facing one another in the tomblike room: Shreve, the Canadian, the child of blizzards and of cold in a bathrobe with an overcoat above it, the collar turned up about his ears; Quentin, the Southerner, the morose and delicate offspring of rain and steamy heat in the thin suitable clothing which he had brought from Mississippi, his overcoat (as thing and vain for what it was as the suit) lying on the floor where he had not even bothered to raise it: