"I just can't do it. I tried to put myself in your place. . .and I can't. This way of life, of thinking..... I can't." "You think I send men to their death without feeling." It was not a question. "No." But Brunner would say no more. "No, but that was cruel of me. Young men are so much more, SENSITIVE. You think you could never send men to theirs, that you are not the right kind of man---cold, calculating. You think too much, feel too much, is that it?" "No..... I don't know." "Save war for lonely old men?" Brunner looked hard at him, defiant. This time he was sure. There was something quietly desperate in his commander's eyes. It was fear. Not the fear of age or death, but that of a far greater hurt: the pain of life's final reckoning, of uselessness and barren seed. "Can I tell you something, 'as a man?'" Dubcek turned his eyes away, poured the bottle into the glass. "Yes." Brunner too looked away. "I wasn't always old, or alone, with no other calling." He breathed heavily through his nose. "But my wife died some years back, and we had no children. Some men can go on from such a thing: find another wife, start again. But I am not one of them. I had never loved before..... But that is beside the point." He drank the glass again. "I found myself alone, in the military, with no real skill other than being a soldier, a good officer. My father had been a working man..... So I put all my energies into advancing my career, trying to fill the emptiness. Telling myself." He gave a short, disagreeable laugh. "Telling myself that if I could only rise high enough through the ranks, that I could SAVE lives. I was going to make certain the old war-mongers who ran the armies of the world did not subject innocent people to the kind of loss I'd known. I was going to see to it that no task force was ever advanced needlessly, no ship ever mindlessly sacrificed to gain a tactical advantage." He stopped, as some other emotion rose up in him. "You say you hated me when you learned I had sacrificed a thousand men and women. What would you feel if we had lost, and left the colonies unprotected?" He rose in a rage, as Brunner stood and backed away. "How would you judge me while some Belgian officer was raping your pretty little wife?" Brunner's eyes flashed murder at him, but he said nothing. "Yes. And how would you have liked me when the political executions and imprisonments began? Forget your romantic notions! When it comes to occupying armies, there are no morals left to judge." He steadied himself, took a breath.