Fritz Leiber

“ The blond soldier murmured two or three words, and for a moment he thought the whole army had spoken to him. Then he understood and made the necessary adjustment in the instrument they were setting up.
But those two or three words had plunged him with breathtaking abruptness into the worst sort of inner misery. What was abstract had become personal, and that was bad. To conceive a monster made of men was one thing; to feel the insensate, inescapable prod of a neighboring cell and realize the stifling, close-packed pressure of the whole, was another. ”

“ To the west—for all planets share a west, if nothing else—the nuclear bombs bloomed, meaningless giant fungi. Invisibly overhead the spaceships roared, distant as gods, yet shaking the yellow sky. Even the soil was treacherous, nauseated by artificial earthquakes—nobody's mother, least of all an Earthman's.
"Why don't you cheer up?" the others had said to him. "It's a mad planet." But he would not cheer up, for he knew what they said was literally true. Soon they would fall back and the enemy would retake the mangled thing they called an objective. ”

“ In the old days the possibility of relaxation and petty self-indulgence, against the magnificent sham background of galactic empire, had permitted him to pretend life had a meaning. Yet at a time like this, when such an illusion was needful, it ran out on you, jeered at you along with the lesser lies it had nurtured. ”

“ He was a ridiculous little communal animal in a lemming-horde racing across the galaxy, and he would live like one.
He saw the small black object falling swiftly through the mist. The stocky soldier did not. There was a deafening blast, that slapped the skin. Looking up he saw the stocky soldier still standing there. Without a head. As the body stumbled blindly forward, tripped and fell, he began to laugh in little hissing gusts through his teeth. His lips were drawn back, so that his jaw muscles twitched and pained him.
He felt contemptuous amusement at the blond soldier. ”

“ You don't set up your own species as a corporate divinity and worship it, and yearn over the light-centuries of its empire, and eat out your heart because of it, and humbly spill your blood at its cosmic altar. ”

“ Silently a dull black spot, not a hole, appeared in the back of the blond soldier's head. He hid the body, walked down the other side of the hill, and attached himself to another unit. By morning they were retreating again, the monster badly hurt and automatically resisting disillusion.
He was an officer now.
"I don't like him," said a soldier. "Of course, they all try to scare you, whether they know it or not. Part of the business. But with him it's different. I know he doesn't talk tough, or threaten or act grim. I know he's pleasant enough when he takes time to notice you. ”

“ Nor are you hoodwinked when the dogs bark about the greatness of humanity under a thousand different moons, or when the dumb cattle sigh from surfeit and gratefully chew their cuds under red, green and purple suns. ”

“ Then they wormed their way up and over, and started to crawl toward where enemy scouts (six legs or eight?) were supposed to lie. He lost sight of them very quickly. He held his weapon ready, watching for the sight of the enemy.
Why did he hate the soldiers of the enemy so little? No more than a Martian hunting sand-dragons hates sand-dragons. His relationship with them was limited, almost abstract. How could he hate something so different from himself in form? He could only marvel that it too had intelligence. No, the enemy were merely dangerous targets. ”

“ Once there had been a galactic society—a galactic empire—and he had played an unnoticed part on one of its nice quiet planets ... but now? Galactic empire? Galactic horse-dung! Perhaps he had always hated his fellow men as much as he did now. But in the prewar days his hatred had been closely bound and meticulously repressed. It was still bound, tighter than ever—but it was no longer repressed.
The deadly engine he tended, silent for a moment, began again to chatter to those of the enemy ”

“ To toss a nuclear fizz-bomb into a dugout where men sought secret escape in dreams and repeated like prayers their rationalizations about galactic empires. Dying at his hand, they might for a moment understand their own vicious hypocrisy. ”

“ There was something comfortingly abstract and impersonal about the idea of being united in such a way with many other men, not because of any shared purpose, but merely because they belonged to the same monster, a monster so large that it could readily do duty for fate and necessity. ”

“ The wars of the far future will be fought with giant spaceships, but it will still take the infantryman to hold down the planets. And some of the thoughts bred in the foxholes of Mars or Alpha Centauri Duo or Rigel Tres will be fully as bitter as some of those dredged up in the foxholes of Earth. ”