• IN these unutterably sad days Sebastian Barry’s powerful, prize-winning, novel Days Without End (2016) about the blood-stained birth of a nation – America – vividly depicts the trauma of the soldiers extinguishing a small, Native American, village full of women and children:

“We work in our lather of strange sorrow, but utterly revengeful, fiercely so, soldiers of intentful termination, of total annihilation.

“Nothing less will slake our thirst.

“Nothing else will fill our hunger.

“To this story of our dead comrades we are writing an end on the hot wind of summer.

“As we fire, we laugh

“As we fire, we cry out.

“As we fire, we weep.”

They lose their humanity and then they lose their soul.

SARA WOOD, NW3