Parade Ground Quotes

To preserve the silence within--amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens--no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky.

You Be The Anchor That Keeps My Feet On The Ground, I'll Be The Wings That Keep Your Heart In The Clouds

If you don't nail your feet to the ground, you can just believe - and you want to believe. It's so enticing. It felt so good. You could just become a gigantic balloon in the Thanksgiving Day parade and float over everybody.

Every year, Kansas watches the world die. Civilizations of wheat grow tall and green; they grow old and golden, and then men shaped from the same earth as the crop cut those lives down. And when the grain is threshed, and the dances and festivals have come and gone, then the fields are given over to fire, and the wheat stubble ascends into the Kansas sky, and the moon swells to bursting above a blackened earth. The fields around Henry, Kansas, had given up their gold and were charred. Some had already been tilled under, waiting for the promised life of new seed. Waiting for winter, and for spring, and another black death. The harvest had been good. Men, women, boys and girls had found work, and Henry Days had been all hot dogs and laughter, even without Frank Willis's old brown truck in the parade. The truck was over on the edge of town, by a lonely barn decorated with new No Trespassing signs and a hole in the ground where the Willis house had been in the spring and the early summer. Late summer had now faded into fall, and the pale blue farm house was gone. Kansas would never forget it.

I was feeling all fertile and blossoming there for a second. And now I just feel like me, on earth. I was floating a little bit there before. I was like a very small version of a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. I was puffy and needed handlers. I was lumbering through the air, a couple inches off the ground. I was veering toward lampposts.

One thing for sure, Muhammad Ali stood his ground and refused to go thousands of miles from home to kill people who never did him any harm—a heroic stand. For this stand, he, like others, was arrested and faced imprisonment. What the government wants is efficient, sterile killers in immoral wars who can be awarded medals and paraded before cheering audiences as great patriotic defenders of our liberty.

the emperor’s two chief ministers were detected in a plan to replace Bonaparte by Murat, the emperor subjected Talleyrand to a lengthy and public dressing down in front of an astonished court. His parade-ground language was shocking, as in his tirade to Whitworth—he called Talleyrand “merde en bas-de-soie” (a shit in silk stockings)—and from that day to this, no one knows whether Bonaparte’s loss of temper was deliberate or not.

Maximus coughed a while longer, but in the middle of the night towards the end of the week, they were all woken by a terrible squealing, distant shrieks of terror and fire; in a panic they burst out from the tents to discover Maximus attempting guiltily to sneak unnoticed back into the parade grounds, with as much success as was to be expected in this endeavor, and carrying in his already-bloodied jaws a spare ox. This he hurriedly swallowed down almost entire, on finding himself observed, and then pretended not to know what they were talking about, insisting he had only got up to stretch his legs and settle himself more comfortably.

Neither of them were warriors. For Trazyn, the dust of the archive was more familiar than that of the parade ground, and Orikan had spent aeons training his mind and neglecting his body. Had this duel occurred during the Flesh Times, it would have been comical. Two withered ancients, rangy, round-shouldered, stained with ink and smelling of incense tearing at each other with barely the strength to bruise. But biotransference had, for all its horrors, made every necron an armored juggernaut. The two swung at each other, filling the gallery with the sounds of the forge. They locked weapons, shoved and bashed their plated skulls like horned beasts.

Proper circus you make,' Berkley said, with a snort of laughter Laurence considered unnecessary, when they landed in the clearing and set the dog down; it promptly went tearing around the parade ground yelling at the dragons. For their part they were only interested and curious until the dog bit a too-inquisitive Dulcia on the tender nip of her muzzle, at which she hissed in anger; the dog yelped and fled back to the dubious shelter of Temeraire's side; he looked down at it in irritation and tried unsuccessfully to nudge it away. 'Pray be careful of the creature; I have no idea how we should get or train another,' Laurence said, and Temeraire at last grumbling allowed it to curl up beside him.

Rooks have clustered on either side of the long road. It is as if they line a grand parade route for our passage. Their black feathers are stark as soot against the white road and the snow. They stab at the ground with their strange bare bills and gray unfeathered faces. The birds are like rough-edged black stones on a string around this stripped cold neck of road. The old books tell us rooks bring the virtuous dead to heaven’s gate.

[Currahee was more a hill than a mountain, but it rose 1,000 feet above the parade ground and dominated the landscape.] A few minutes later, someone blew a whistle. We fell in, were ordered to change to boots and athletic trunks, did so, fell in again—and then ran most of the three miles to the top and back down again.” They lost some men that first day. Within a week, they were running—or at least double-timing—all the way up and back.

Then there is the machine that belonged to Louis Blériot himself. I found an old newspaper article by the Dutch correspondent Alexander Cohen, dealing with a series of aviation experiments at the parade grounds in Issy-les-Moulineaux late on a dusky Friday afternoon, 22 November, 1907. Cohen watched M. Farman leave the ground in a ‘giant insect’ of canvas, bamboo and aluminium, and fly for several hundred metres. Which was more than could be said of Blériot’s ‘flying beast’.

Nonsense! Everything is simple if you really set your mind on it. Don’t get it into your head that you’re indispensable. Someone else would drill your Ruthenian blockheads while you were away. And by the way, Papa could fix up things with regard to your leave in half an hour. He knows a dozen people at the War Office, and at a word from higher quarters you’ll get what you want. It really wouldn’t do you any harm, either, to see something of the world outside your riding school and parade ground. No more excuses now — the matter’s settled. Papa will see to it.

Jumpin’ and Mabel had to wait for the verdict outside among the palmettos and saw grass of the square, along with the few other blacks. Just as they spread colorful quilts on the ground and unpacked biscuits and sausage from paper bags, a rain shower sent them grabbing things and running for cover under the overhang of the Sing Oil. Mr. Lane shouted that they had to wait outside—a fact they’d known for a hundred years—and not to get in the way of any customers. Some whites crowded in the diner or the Dog-Gone for coffee, and others clustered in the street beneath bright umbrellas. Kids splashed in sudden puddles and ate Cracker Jacks, expecting a parade.

There are two months left to the deployment and the men devise all kinds of ways to quantify that: number of patrols, number of KOP rotations, number of mefloquine Mondays. It’s starting to dawn on them that they’ll probably never walk to the top of Honcho Hill again or get dropped onto the Abas Ghar. When they’re down at the KOP they use the communal laptops to try to arrange girlfriends for themselves when they get back. The men who already have girlfriends arrange to have them stock up on beer, steak, whatever they’ve been craving for the past year. The men will fly into Aviano Air Base, take a two-hour bus ride to Vicenza, turn in their weapons, and then form up on a parade ground called Hoekstra Field. As soon as they’re discharged they can do whatever they want. The drinking starts immediately and continues until unconsciousness and then resumes whenever and wherever the men wake up. They find themselves at train stations and on sidewalks and in police stations and occasionally at the medical facilities. In past years one drunken paratrooper was struck by a train and killed and another died of an overdose. They’d made it through the dangers of combat and died within sight of their barracks in Vicenza. “Y’all will only be remembered for the last thing you ever did,” Caldwell warned them one warm spring night.

I’ve been queen for ages and ages,” Sunny went on. She strutted across the cave floor. “No one dares challenge me for my throne! I am the strongest SandWing queen who ever lived!” “Don’t forget the treasure,” Tsunami hissed, pointing at a pile of loose rocks. “Oh, right,” Sunny said. “It’s probably because of all my treasure! I have so much treasure because I’m such an important queen!” She swept the rocks toward her and gathered them between her talons. “Did someone say treasure?” Clay bellowed, leaping out from behind a large rock formation. Sunny yelped with fright. “No!” Tsunami called. “You’re not scared! You’re Queen Oasis, the big, bad queen of the sand dragons.” “R-right,” Sunny said. “Rargh! What is this tiny scavenger doing in the Kingdom of Sand? I am not afraid of tiny scavengers! I shall go out there and eat him in one bite!” Glory started giggling so hard she had to lie down and cover her face with her wings. Even Tsunami was making faces like she was trying not to laugh. Clay swung his stalagmite in a circle. “Squeak squeak squeak!” he shouted. “And other annoying scavenger noises! I’m here to steal treasure away from a magnificent dragon!” “Not from me, you won’t,” Sunny said, bristling. She stamped forward, spread her wings, and raised her tail threateningly. Without the poisonous barb other SandWings had, Sunny’s tail was not very menacing. But nobody pointed that out. “Yaaaaaaah!” Clay shouted, lunging forward with his rock claw. Sunny darted out of the way, and they circled each other, feinting and jabbing. This was Clay’s favorite part. When Sunny forgot about trying to act queenly and focused on the battle, she was fun to fight. Her small size made it easy for her to dodge and slip under his defenses. But in the end Queen Oasis had to lose — that was how the story went. Clay drove Sunny back against the wall of the cave and thrust the fake claw between her neck and her wing, pretending it went right through her heart. “Aaaaaaaargh,” Sunny howled. “Impossible! A queen defeated by a lowly scavenger! The kingdom will fall apart! Oh, my treasure … my lovely treasure . . .” She collapsed to the ground and let her wings flop lifelessly on either side of her. “Ha ha ha!” Clay said. “And squeak squeak! The treasure is mine!” He scooped up all the rocks and paraded away, lashing his tail proudly.

clothes off, cept for the big chef’s hat I was wearin at the time. An it blowed stew all over us, so’s we looked like—well, I don’t know what we looked like—but man, it was strange. Incredibly, it didn’t do nothin to all them guys settin out there in the mess hall neither. Jus lef em settin at they tables, covered with stew, actin kinda shell-shocked or somethin—but it sure did shut their asses up about when they food is gonna be ready. Suddenly the company commander come runnin into the buildin. “What was that!” he shouted. “What happen?” He look at the two of us, an then holler, “Sergeant Kranz, is that you?” “Gump—Boiler—Stew!” the sergeant say, an then he kind of git holt of hissef an grapped a meat cleaver off the wall. “Gump—Boiler—Stew!” he scream, an come after me with the cleaver. I done run out the door, an he be chasin me all over the parade grounds, an even thru the Officer’s Club an the Motorpool. I outrunned him tho, cause that is my specialty, but let me say this: they ain’t no question in my mind that I am up the creek for sure. One night, the next fall, the phone rung in the barracks an it was Bubba. He say they done dropped his atheletic scholarship cause his foot broke worst than they thought, an so he’s leavin school too. But he axed if I can git off to come up to Birmingham to watch the University play them geeks from Mississippi. But I am confined to quarters that Saturday, as I have been ever weekend since the stew

Just like in the movies I watched on community television, a beautiful collection of elevated houses parades both sides of the street, each with their respective porches and separated by green lawns. Trees and gardens, cut to perfection, adorn the front of each home. Some have a flag of stars and stripes planted in the ground, and the street is empty except for a dog roaming down the block.

This was the other side of love. This was the aftermath, the cost, the opposite end of the bargain. This was the dirty, damp confetti and trampled flower petals, stamped into the muddy ground and tossed about by the wind, long after the parade had ended. This was the sad, lonely echo in the hall, now that the dance was over. Here, in this room, was grief. But grief was love in its second shape.

Italy still has a provincial sophistication that comes from its long history as a collection of city states. That, combined with a hot climate, means that the Italians occupy their streets and squares with much greater ease than the English. The resultant street life is very rich, even in small towns like Arezzo and Gaiole, fertile ground for the peeping Tom aspect of an actor’s preparation. I took many trips to Siena, and was struck by its beauty, but also by the beauty of the Siennese themselves. They are dark, fierce, and aristocratic, very different to the much paler Venetians or Florentines. They have always looked like this, as the paintings of their ancestors testify. I observed the groups of young people, the lounging grace with which they wore their clothes, their sense of always being on show. I walked the streets, they paraded them. It did not matter that I do not speak a word of Italian; I made up stories about them, and took surreptitious photographs. I was in Siena on the final day of the Palio, a lengthy festival ending in a horse race around the main square. Each district is represented by a horse and jockey and a pair of flag-bearers. The day is spent by teams of supporters with drums, banners, and ceremonial horse and rider processing round the town singing a strange chanting song. Outside the Cathedral, watched from a high window by a smiling Cardinal and a group of nuns, with a huge crowd in the Cathedral Square itself, the supporters passed, and to drum rolls the two flag-bearers hurled their flags high into the air and caught them, the crowd roaring in approval. The winner of the extremely dangerous horse race is presented with a palio, a standard bearing the effigy of the Virgin. In the last few years the jockeys have had to be professional by law, as when they were amateurs, corruption and bribery were rife. The teams wear a curious fancy dress encompassing styles from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. They are followed by gangs of young men, supporters, who create an atmosphere or intense rivalry and barely suppressed violence as they run through the narrow streets in the heat of the day. It was perfect. I took many more photographs. At the farmhouse that evening, after far too much Chianti, I and my friends played a bizarre game. In the dark, some of us moved lighted candles from one room to another, whilst others watched the effect of the light on faces and on the rooms from outside. It was like a strange living film of the paintings we had seen. Maybe Derek Jarman was spying on us.

You own a sweet shop?” St. Just fell in step beside Westhaven, all bonhomie and good cheer. “Diversification of assets, Kettering calls it. Get your own sweet shop, why don’t you?” “My brother, a confectioner. Marriage has had such a positive impact on you, Westhaven. How long have you owned this fine establishment?” It was a fine establishment, which was to say, it was warm. The scents of chocolate and cinnamon thick in the air didn’t hurt, either. Westhaven waited silently while St. Just peered around the place with unabashed curiosity. There was a prodigious amount of pink in the decor, and ribbon bows and small baskets and tins artfully decorated. “You own a bordello for sweets,” St. Just observed in a carrying voice likely honed on the parade grounds of Spain. “It’s charming.” “Unlike you.” “You’re just cold and missing your countess. One must make allowances.” Mercifully, those allowances meant St. Just kept quiet while Westhaven purchased a quantity of marzipan. “You aren’t going to tell the troops to carry on, God Save the King, and all that?” St. Just asked as they left the shop. He reached over and stuffed his fingers into the bag of sweets Westhaven was carrying. “Help yourself, by all means.” “Can’t leave all the heavy lifting to my younger brothers.

One article on reproductive strategies was titled "Sneaky Fuckers." Kya laughed. As is well known, the article began, in nature, usually the males with the most prominent secondary sexual characteristics, such as the biggest antlers, deepest voices, broadest chests, and superior knowledge secure the best territories because they have fended off weaker males. The females choose to mate with these imposing alphas and are thereby inseminated with the best DNA around, which is passed on to the female's offspring- one of the most powerful phenomena in the adaptation and continuance of life. Plus, the females get the best territory for their young. However, some stunted males, not strong, adorned, or smart enough to hold good territories, possess bags of tricks to fool the females. They parade their smaller forms around in pumped-up postures or shout frequently- even if in shrill voices. By relying on pretense and false signals, they manage to grab a copulation here or there. Pint-sized male bullfrogs, the author wrote, hunker down in the grass and hide near an alpha male who is croaking with great gusto to call in mates. When several females are attracted to his strong vocals at the same time, and the alpha is busy copulating with one, the weaker male leaps in and mates one of the others. The imposter males were referred to as "sneaky fuckers." Kya remembered, those many years ago, Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. "Unworthy boys make a lot of noise," Ma had said. She read a consolation for females. Nature is audacious enough to ensure that the males who send out dishonest signals or go from one female to the next almost always end up alone. Another article delved into the wild rivalries between sperm. Across most life-forms, males compete to inseminate females. Male lions occasionally fight to the death; rival bull elephants lock tusks and demolish the ground beneath their feet as they tear at each other's flesh. Though very ritualized, the conflicts can still end in mutilations. To avoid such injuries, inseminators of some species compete in less violent, more creative methods. Insects, the most imaginative. The penis of the male damselfly is equipped with a small scoop, which removes sperm ejected by a previous opponent before he supplies his own. Kya dropped the journal on her lap, her mind drifting with the clouds. Some female insects eat their mates, overstressed mammal mothers abandon their young, many males design risky or shifty ways to outsperm their competitors. Nothing seemed too indecorous as long as the tick and the tock of life carried on. She knew this was not a dark side to Nature, just inventive ways to endure against all odds. Surely for humans there was more.

The hero-deed to be wrought is not today what it was in the century of Galileo. Where then there was darkness, now there is light; but also, where light was, there now is darkness. The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul. Obviously, this work cannot be wrought by turning back, or away, from what has been accomplished by the modern revolution; for the problem is nothing if not that of rendering the modern world spiritually significant—or rather (phrasing the same principle the other way round) nothing if not that of making it possible for men and women to come to full human maturity through the conditions of contemporary life. Indeed, these conditions themselves are what have rendered the ancient formulae ineffective, misleading, and even pernicious. The community today is the planet, not the bounded nation; hence the patterns of projected aggression which formerly served to coordinate the in-group now can only break it into factions. The national idea, with the flag as totem, is today an aggrandizer of the nursery ego, not the annihilator of an infantile situation. Its parody rituals of the parade ground serve the ends of Holdfast, the tyrant dragon, not the God in whom self-interest is annihilate. And the numerous saints of this anticult—namely the patriots whose ubiquitous photographs, draped with flags, serve as official icons—are precisely the local threshold guardians (our demon Sticky-hair) whom it is the first problem of the hero to surpass.

and at one point they had heard what had sounded mighty like a musket shot which, although not very near, might or might not have been fired in their direction but, they decided, probably had been. Harry clung to this adventure, such as it was, all the more tenaciously when he found that because of his sprained wrist he had missed an adventure at Captainganj. Those of his peers who had escaped with life and limb from the Captainganj parade ground did not seem to be thinking of it as an adventure, those who had managed to escape unhurt were now looking tired and shocked. And they seemed to be having trouble telling Harry what it had been like. Each of them simply had two or three terrible scenes printed on his mind: an Englishwoman trying to say something to him with her throat cut, or a comrade spinning down into a whirl-pool of hacking sepoys, something of that sort. To make things worse, one kept finding oneself about to say something to a friend who was not there to hear it any more. It was hard to make any sense out of what had happened, and after a while they gave up trying. Of the score of subalterns who had managed to escape, the majority had never seen a dead person before . . . a dead English person, anyway . . . one occasionally bumped into a dead native here and there but that was not quite the same. Strangely enough, they listened quite enviously to Harry talking about the musket shot which had “almost definitely” been fired at himself and Fleury. They wished they had had an adventure too, instead of their involuntary glimpse of the abattoir. It

Larrey amputated two hundred limbs that day. After the battle the 2nd Light Horse Lancers of the Guard, known as the Dutch Red Lancers, spent the night in woods that had been captured by Poniatowski’s infantry, where the ground around the trees was so heavily littered with corpses that they were forced to carry scores out of the way before they could clear a space for their tents.112 ‘In order to get some water it was necessary to travel far from the field of battle,’ wrote the veteran Major Louis Joseph Vionnet of the Middle Guard in his memoirs. ‘Any water to be found on the field was so soaked with blood that even the horses refused to drink it.’113 When the next day Napoleon arrived to thank and reward the remains of the 61st Demi-Brigade for capturing the Grand Redoubt, he asked its colonel why its third battalion wasn’t on parade. ‘Sire,’ came the reply, ‘it is in the redoubt.’114

The question revives Kropp, more particularly as he hears there’s no more beer in the canteen. “It’s not only Himmelstoss, there are lots of them. As sure as they get a stripe or a star they become different men, just as though they’d swallowed concrete.” “That’s the uniform,” I suggest. “Roughly speaking it is,” says Kat, and prepares for a long speech; “but the root of the matter lies somewhere. For instance, if you train a dog to eat potatoes and then afterwards put a piece of meat in front of him, he’ll snap at it, it’s his nature. And if you give a man a little bit of authority he behaves just the same way, he snaps at it too. The things are precisely the same. In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum. The army is based on that; one man must always have power over the other. The mischief is merely that each one has much too much power. A non-com. can torment a private, a lieutenant a non-com., a captain a lieutenant, until he goes mad. And because they know they can, they all soon acquire the habit more or less. Take a simple case: we are marching back from the parade-ground dog-tired. Then comes the order to sing. We sing spiritlessly, for it is all we can do to trudge along with our rifles. At once the company is turned about and has to do another hour’s drill as punishment. On the march back the order to sing is given again, and once more we start. Now what’s the use of all that? It’s simply that the company commander’s head has been turned by having so much power. And nobody blames him. On the contrary, he is praised for being strict. That, of course, is only a trifling instance, but it holds also in very different affairs. Now I ask you: Let a man be whatever you like in peacetime, what occupation is there in which he can behave like that without getting a crack on the nose? He can only do that in the army. It goes to the heads of them all, you see. And the more insignificant a man has been in civil life the worse it takes him.

America the Innocent, always searching for the totems of a unity that it can never quite achieve--even, or especially, when its crises of disunity are most pressing. It is one of the structuring stories of our nation. The "return to normalcy" enjoined by Warren Harding after the Great War; the cult of suburban home and hearth after World War II; the union of hearts declaimed by Adams on Boston's Bunker Hill parade ground after the War Between the States.

The afternoon was given over to sport, or to the appreciation of sport, as Ulf watched two football matches on the television, one after the other. They were scrappy and inconclusive games, marred by several ill-natured arguments with the referee. That always irritated Ulf, who felt that referees should be granted powers of arrest. If the police were waiting on the lines, and offenders could be seized and marched off to the cells, then there would be none of this bad behaviour, thought Ulf. As it was, these overpaid and over-indulged sportsmen could play to the gallery, parading their egos in displays of arrogance and petulance that held up the game unnecessarily. And as for those who deliberately sought to prolong a match for strategic reasons by feigning injury, they would soon abandon that if referees were allowed to count them out on the ground, just as the umpires of boxing matches could do. They would not have to count up to ten, thought Ulf: three would probably be enough to restore these sham casualties to rude health.

What is it about the fall that seems sentimental and romantic? There is something magical and mysterious about the way the leaves drop to the ground and how they shimmer in red, gold, and brown, creating a blanket of memories. And as you watch the trees become bare, a sweet, nostalgic feeling exists inside of you as you stroll the sidewalks that glisten with traces of rain, sprinkled across each path like little jewels. Your heart beats in a different rhythm as your thoughts dwell and wander about. You remember things that should be forgotten because they broke your heart once, and yet you allow them to linger for a while for the sake of reminiscing. You parade with the hopeless romantics and the brokenhearted down the streets, alone, reliving moments that once were. You hold on to these memories until the last day of fall, hoping that by winter, you will forget them all.

I bought the records. Can't play them now. No wind-up gramophone! But I am a sentimental fellow and I keep them among my souvenirs as a reminder of the days when I walked home alone across the silent, moonlit parade ground, after the evening show was over.

Now, whenever she smelled the gums, the balsams, and the special aromatics that arrived with merchants from afar, her head reeled with images of temples, shrines, palaces, fortresses, mysterious walls, tapestries, paintings, jewels, liquors, icons, drugs, dyes, meats, sweets, sweetmeats, silks, bolts and bolts of cotton cloth, ores, shiny metals, foodstuffs, spices, musical instruments, ivory daggers and ivory dolls, masks, bells, carvings, statues (ten times as tall as she!), lumber, leopards on leashes, peacocks, monkeys, white elephants with tattooed ears, horses, camels, princes, maharajah, conquerors, travelers (Turks with threatening mustaches and Greeks with skin as pale as the stranger who had befriended her at the funeral grounds), singers, fakirs, magicians, acrobats, prophets, scholars, monks, madmen, sages, saints, mystics, dreamers, prostitutes, dancers, fanatics, avatars, poets, thieves, warriors, snake charmers, pageants, parades, rituals, executions, weddings, seductions, concerts, new religions, strange philosophies, fevers, diseases, splendors and magnificences and things too fearsome to be recounted, all writhing, cascading, jumbling, mixing, splashing, and spinning; vast, complex, inexhaustible, forever.

I don’t understand why you’re just standing around!” Nero shouted, putting a bundle of five logs on his back. “Come on! Move it! Otherwise, you’ll be running until dinner! Which will be... tomorrow evening! Now… FUCKING MOVE!” The recruits immediately rushed over to the log pyramid. Groaning, moaning, and drenched in sweat, they haphazardly threw the logs across their shoulders and, for the most part, found they couldn’t even move. Most of them stumbled, limped, and almost crawled around the parade ground. In their eyes, these officers were no longer just living legends. Not merely the heroes of bards’ songs. No. They were demons that had crept out of the abyss. It was only their first day with this newly formed squad, and some of the soldiers were already cursing the day they had decided to join it.

breakfast. You were given a label yesterday. Write your home address on it and tie it to your suitcase and then take it to the postal depot after breakfast. It’s on the way to the parade ground.’ Surely they’d not have to have their irons when they did their first round of drill? ‘Excuse me, Corp, if we have to bring our irons back after breakfast then wouldn’t it be better to take our suitcases then?’ The woman scowled, unhappy about being shown up. ‘Leave the cases here and collect them when you bring your irons back. The extra half a mile added to your

There were times when Caleb thought he’d go insane if he had to put another platoon of privates through their paces on the parade grounds. But now there was Lily, and she’d changed everything. As soon as he’d brought her around to his way of thinking and she was safely ensconced in a proper house, Caleb decided, he would go back to Pennsylvania and make an attempt at setting things right. Maybe he would even leave the army and take his proper place in the world. Lily

The land was used to peace, and in the ordinary way its experience with military matters was confined to the militia muster — awkward men parading with heavy-footed informality in the public square, jugs circulating up and down the rear rank, fires lit for the barbecue feast, small boys clustering around, half derisive and half admiring — and if war came the soldier was a minuteman who went to a bloodless field where it was always the other fellow who would get hit. Just before Fort Sumter the Michigan legislature had been debating an act permitting the governor to raise two new regiments of militia.

Of course it’s fairly obvious where it’s coming from. Even the most casual Democratic voters understand by now that there is a schism within the party, one that pits “party insiders” steeped in the inside-baseball muck of Washington money culture against . . . well, against us, the actual voters. The insiders have for many years running now succeeded in convincing their voters that their actual beliefs are hopeless losers in the general electoral arena, and that certain compromises must be made if the party is ever to regain power. This defeatist nonsense is sold to the public in the form of beady-eyed party hacks talking to one another in the opinion pages of national media conglomerates, where, after much verbose and solemn discussion, the earnest and idealistic candidate the public actually likes is dismissed on the grounds that “he can’t win.” In his place is trotted out the guy the party honchos insist to us is the real “winner”—some balding, bent little bureaucrat who has grown prematurely elderly before our very eyes over the course of ten or twenty years of sad, compromise-filled service in the House or the Senate. This “winner” is then given a lavish parade and sent out there on the trail, and we hold our noses as he campaigns in our name on a platform of Jesus, the B-2 bomber, and the death penalty for eleven-year-olds, consoling ourselves that he at least isn’t in favor of repealing the Voting Rights Act. (Or is he? We have to check.) Then he loses to the Republicans anyway and we start all over again—beginning with the next primary election, when we are again told that the antiwar candidate “can’t win” and that the smart bet is the corporate hunchback still wearing two black eyes from the last race. No

Ah, I see your point. I did assist on the Okinawa drop, as the British representative. Quite simple, after we’d seen the Berlin effects. Another ground-pounder drop near the top of that mountain, killed the army inside, without too many of the villagers on the mountain’s other side. Precision, rather.” Plus Hiroshima a few weeks later, Karl thought, and so the war ended in crimson blisters. Their crowd grew. Karl saw parading at the head of a column of tourists a Bavarian girl in the traditional garb of apron and knee-length white socks. The Germans were anxiously amiable, voices ringing high in the sweet warm air. If they had been dogs, their tails would have constantly wagged. The swirl and charm of these streets still caught at his heart. As good as it gets, a phrase he had heard somewhere, rang in him. Yet he knew that beyond these blithe provinces the world called the West, the world’s pain played out in the presence of God’s unimpeachable policy of No Comment. The silence of these skies . . . , he thought, and wondered if maybe he needed a glass of something delicious and reassuring. Red, yes. Maybe a Burgundy. The eighteenth-century

The SS Usaramo discharged her enthusiastic passengers in die Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, Germany, in the Spring of 1937. We no sooner arrived in Mannheim when we heard of the Hindenburg disaster, which happened on May 6, 1937, in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Tensions were running high and many people believed that the magnificent German airship had been brought down by an act of sabotage. From 1934 through 1938, Nazi Party events were held throughout Germany, especially at rallies at the parade grounds in Nuremberg. Many films were made there to commemorate these events, the most famous of which is Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Amazingly, many people in Germany had become fanaticized and believed the vile propaganda that was being generated by SS leader Heinrich Himmler and his revoltingly talented staff.

First, the explosion of life. Then came the celebration. Such as it had been for generations and generations, as long as the eldest of the eldest could remember; as long as the record books had kept steady score. By the time the first buds were edging their green shoots from the dirt, the parade grounds had been cleared and the maypole had been pulled from its exile in the basement of the Mansion. The board had met and the Queen decided; all that was left was the wait. The wait for May.

A hand touched her shoulder. “Miss Erstwhile,” Martin said. Jane spun around, guilty to have just come from a marriage proposal, ecstatic at her refusal, dispirited by another ending, and surprised to discover Martin was the one person in the world she most wanted to see. “Good evening, Theodore,” she said. “I’m Mr. Bentley now, a man of land and status, hence the fancy garb. They’ll allow me to be gentry tonight because they need the extra bodies, but only so long as I don’t talk too much.” His eyes flicked to a point across the room. Jane followed his glance and saw Mrs. Wattlesbrook wrapped in yards of lace and eyeing them suspiciously. “Let’s not talk, then.” Jane pulled him into the next dance. He stood opposite her, tall and handsome and so real there among all the half-people. They didn’t talk as they paraded and turned and touched hands, wove and skipped and do-si-doed, but they smiled enough to feel silly, their eyes full of a secret joke, their hands reluctant to let go. As the dance finished, Jane noticed Mrs. Wattlesbrook making her determined way toward them. “We should probably…” Martin said. Jane grabbed his hand and ran, fleeing to the rhythm of another dance tune, out the ballroom door and into a side corridor. Behind them, hurried boot heels echoed. They ran through the house and out back, crunching gravel under their feet, making for the dark line of trees around the perimeter of the park. Jane hesitated before the damp grass. “My dress,” she said. Martin threw her over his shoulder, her legs hanging down his front. He ran. Jostled on her stomach, Jane gave out laughter that sounded like hiccups. He weaved his way around hedges and monuments, finally stopping on a dry patch of ground hidden by trees. “Here you are, my lady,” he said, placing her back on her feet. Jane wobbled for a moment before gaining her balance. “So, these are your lands, Mr. Bentley.” “Why, yes. I shape the shrubs myself. Gardeners these days aren’t worth a damn.” “I should be engaged to Mr. Nobley tonight. You know you’ve absolutely ruined this entire experience for me.” “I’m sorry, but I warned you, five minutes with me and you’ll never go back.” “You’re right about that. I’d decided to give up on men entirely, but you made that impossible.” “Listen, I’m not trying to start anything serious. I just--” “Don’t worry.” Jane smiled innocently. “Weird intense Jane gone, new relaxed Jane just happy to see you.” “You do seem different.” He touched her arms, pulled her in closer. “I’m happy to see you too, if you’d know. I think I missed you a bit.” “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.

She sat on the wall, opened her book, and paid him no mind. After a few minutes the sounds of clipping stopped, and she felt his gaze on her. She turned a page. “Jane,” he said with a touch of exasperation. “Shh, I’m reading,” she said. “Jane, listen, someone warned me that another fellow heard my telly playing and told Mrs. Wattlesbrook, and I had to toss it out this morning. If they spot me hanging around you..” “You’re not hanging around me, I’m reading.” “Bugger, Jane…” “Martin, please, I’m sorry about your TV but you can’t cast me away now. I’ll go raving mad if I have to sit in that house again all afternoon. I haven’t sewn a thing since junior high Home Ec when I made a pair of gray shorts that ripped at the butt seam the first time I sat down, and I haven’t played pianoforte since I quit from boredom at age twelve, and I haven’t read a book in the middle of the day since college, so you see what a mess I’m in.” “So,” Martin said, digging in his spade. “You’ve come to find me again when there is no one else to flirt with.” Huh! thought Jane. He snapped a dead branch off the trunk. Huh! she thought again. She stood and started to walk away. “Wait.” Martin hopped after her, grabbing her elbow. “I saw you with those actors, parading around the grounds this morning. I hadn’t seen you with them before. In the context. And it bothered me. I mean, you don’t really go in for this stuff, do you?” Jane shrugged. “You do?” “More than I want to, though you’ve been making it seem unnecessary lately.” Martin squinted up at a cloud. “I’ve never understood the women who come here, and you’re one of them. I can’t make sense of it.” “I don’t think I could explain it to a man. If you were a woman, all I’d have to say is ‘Colin Firth in a wet shirt’ and you’d say, ‘Ah.’” “Ah. I mean, aha! is what I mean.” Crap. She’d hoped he would laugh at the Colin Firth thing. And he didn’t. And now the silence made her feel as though she were standing on a seesaw, waiting for the weight to drop on the other side. Then she smelled it. The musty, acrid, sour, curdled, metallic, decaying odor of ending. This wasn’t just a first fight. She’d been in this position too many times not to recognize the signs. “Are you breaking up with me?” she asked. “Were we ever together enough to require breaking up?” Oh. Ouch. She took a step back on that one. Perhaps it was her dress that allowed her to compose herself more quickly than normal. She curtsied. “Pardon the interruption, I mistook you for someone I knew.” She turned and left, wishing for a Victorian-type gown so she could have whipped the full skirts for a satisfying little cracking sound. She had to satisfy herself with emphatically tightening her bonnet ribbon as she marched. You stupid, stupid girl, she thought. You were fantasizing again. Stop it! It had all been going so well. She’d let herself have fun, unwind, not plague a new romance with constant questions such as, What if? And after? And will he love me forever? “Are you breaking up with me…?” she muttered to herself. He must think she was a lunatic. And really, he’d be right. Here she was in Pembrook Park, a place where women hand over scads of dough to hook up with men paid to adore them, but she finds the one man on campus who’s in a position to reject her and then leads him into it. Typical Jane.

Then, just as there was a glimmer of economic recovery, war exploded across Europe and Asia. When Pearl Harbor made it irrefutably clear that America was not a fortress, this generation was summoned to the parade ground and told to train for war. They left their ranches in Sully County, South Dakota, their jobs on the main street of Americus, Georgia, they gave up their place on the assembly lines in Detroit and in the ranks of Wall Street, they

In 1837, New York University erected a Gothic Revival building on the northeast corner of the parade grounds at Washington Square, constructed from stones cut by convicts at Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison located about thirty miles up the river in Ossining, New York. The indignant stonecutters of New York’s Stonecutters Guild promptly organized New York’s first mass labor demonstration in Washington Square, which continued for days. To complete its construction, NYU was forced to call in the 27th Regiment of the National Guard to clear the demonstrators from the site.

Prior to World War II, in 1938, a German publisher was preparing to release a German-language version of The Hobbit and sent Tolkien a letter of inquiry asking him to validate his Aryan origins. In fact, the name “Tolkien” is believed to be German. The family seems to have had its roots in Saxony (modern-day Germany) but had been in England since the 18th century, when it became fervently English. As a matter of fact, while he was a boy at King Edward's School, young Ronald had helped line the route for the coronation parade of King George V. Still, Tolkien could easily have fallen back upon his father’s Germanic ancestry. Instead, he took the moral high ground. Angered, he pointed out that “Aryan” was a linguistic term, not a racial one. He then expressed regret that he had no ancestors among the “gifted” Jewish people, although he was pleased to point out that he had many Jewish friends. He was bitterly opposed to the “ignoramus” of a German leader who had usurped and perverted the northern European cultural heritage he so loved.

To recover an intuitive sense of what will be in season throughout the year, picture a season of foods unfolding as if from one single plant. Take a minute to study this creation—an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest. We’ll call it a vegetannual. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. Small leaves appear, then bigger leaves. As the plant grows up into the sunshine and the days grow longer, flower buds will appear, followed by small green fruits. Under midsummer’s warm sun, the fruits grow larger, riper, and more colorful. As days shorten into the autumn, these mature into hard-shelled fruits with appreciable seeds inside. Finally, as the days grow cool, the vegetannual may hoard the sugars its leaves have made, pulling them down into a storage unit of some kind: a tuber, bulb, or root. So goes the year. First the leaves: spinach, kale, lettuce, and chard (here, that’s April and May). Then more mature heads of leaves and flower heads cabbage, romaine, broccoli, and cauliflower (May–June). Then tender young fruit-set: snow peas, baby squash, cucumbers (June), followed by green beans, green peppers, and small tomatoes (July). Then more mature, colorfully ripened fruits: beefsteak tomatoes, eggplants, red and yellow peppers (late July–August). Then the large, hard-shelled fruits with developed seeds inside: cantaloupes, honeydews, watermelons, pumpkins, winter squash (August–September). Last come the root crops, and so ends the produce parade. Plainly these don’t all come from the same plant, but each comes from a plant, that’s the point—a plant predestined to begin its life in the spring and die in the fall. (A few, like onions and carrots, are attempting to be biennials, but we’ll ignore that for now.) Each plant part we eat must come in its turn—leaves, buds, flowers, green fruits, ripe fruits, hard fruits—because that is the necessary order of things for an annual plant. For the life of them, they can’t do it differently. Some minor deviations and a bit of overlap are allowed, but in general, picturing an imaginary vegetannual plant is a pretty reliable guide to what will be in season, wherever you live. If you find yourself eating a watermelon in April, you can count back three months and imagine a place warm enough in January for this plant to have launched its destiny.

It looks out across the parade ground towards Buckingham Palace,

I walked back across the parade ground beneath the shadows of the massive oak trees on the southern fringe of the parade ground and the two howitzer cannons, Barnwell and Freeman, named for the two Institute cadets who fired the first shots on Fort Sumter to begin the Civil War.

On taking office, Mayor Hone faced the first major challenge to the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan: a proposal to do away with the military parade ground at Madison Square that

In a stroke of genius, the mayor found a solution. He asked the Common Council to annex the Greenwich Village potter’s field as a new military parade ground, which he would also use as the site for his party. The graveyard, which had closed the year before, had outlived its usefulness. And this wasn’t just a short-term fix. Hone was playing a long game, and this new “Washington Parade-Ground” was just the opening gambit.

Washington Memorial Parade-Ground on July 4, 1826, it completely masks an even older history. Underneath the park’s asphalt and grass are the bodies of countless New Yorkers buried between 1797 and 1825.

In Mangando and Marimbanguengo, I saw the full misery and evil of the war, the pointlessness of it all, in the soldiers’ eyes, like those of wounded birds, in their state of despair and abandon, in the second lieutenant in shorts sprawled on the table, the stray dogs gobbling up leftovers on the parade ground, the flag hanging from the flag­pole like a limp penis, I saw it in the twenty-year-old men sitting in the shade in silence, like old men in parks...

Noah and his crew were an obnoxious group of alphaholes who paraded around the grounds like they owned the place. Were they skilled at their respective sports? Yes. No one would deny that. But these girls were better. Noah and his minions were nice to the girls at the camp (particularly the hot girls), but for the most part, boys played boys and girls played girls. Until they didn't.

Six days after the explosion, as nuclear fragments continued to rain down from Chernobyl’s toxic cloud, party officials evacuated their own children to safety on the Crimean peninsula, even as they instructed Ukraine’s citizens to carry on with their annual May Day parade. Just sixty miles south of Chernobyl’s ground zero, thousands of people—including countless children—marched down Kyiv’s main drag of Khreshchatyk Street. They carried flowers, flags, and portraits of Soviet leaders, unaware that those same leaders had knowingly exposed them to the fallout of one of the worst industrial disasters in history.

As the scientific forester may dream of a perfectly legible forest planted with same-aged, single-species, uniform trees growing in straight lines in a rectangular flat space cleared of all underbrush and poachers,85 so the exacting state official may aspire to a perfectly legible population with registered, unique names and addresses keyed to grid settlements; who pursue single, identifiable occupations; and all of whose transactions are documented according to the designated formula and in the official language. This caricature of society as a military parade ground is overdrawn, but the grain of truth that it embodies may help us understand the grandiose plans we will examine later.86 The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a “civilizing mission.” The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.

They're kidding themselves, of course. Our sky can go from lapis to tin in the blink of an eye. Blink again and your latte's diluted. And that's just fine with me. I thrive here on the certainty that no matter how parched my glands, how anhydrous the creek beds, how withered the weeds in the lawn, it's only a matter of time before the rains come home. The rains will steal down from the Sasquatch slopes. They will rise with the geese from the marshes and sloughs. Rain will fall in sweeps, it will fall in drones, it will fall in cascades of cheap Zen jewelry. And it will rain a fever. And it will rain a sacrifice. And it will rain sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem. Rain will primitivize the cities, slowing every wheel, animating every gutter, diffusing commercial neon into smeary blooms of esoteric calligraphy. Rain will dramatize the countryside, sewing pearls into every web, winding silk around every stump, redrawing the horizon line with a badly frayed brush dipped in tea and quicksilver. And it will rain an omen. And it will rain a trance. And it will rain a seizure. And it will rain dangers and pale eggs of the beast. Rain will pour for days unceasing. Flooding will occur. Wells will fill with drowned ants, basements with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics will roam the dripping peninsulas. Moisture will gleam on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their rest in dead tree trunks, will clack their clamshell teeth in the submerged doorways of video parlors. Rivers will swell, sloughs will ferment. Vapors will billow from the troll-infested ditches, challenging windshield wipers, disgusing intentions and golden arches. Water will stream off eaves and umbrellas. It will take on the colors of beer signs and headlamps. It will glisten on the claws of nighttime animals. And it will rain a screaming. And it will rain a rawness. And it will rain a disorder, and hair-raising hisses from the oldest snake in the world. Rain will hiss on the freeways. It will hiss around the prows of fishing boats. It will hiss in the electrical substations, on the tips of lit cigarettes, and in the trash fires of the dispossessed. Legends will wash from desecrated burial grounds, graffiti will run down alley walls. Rain will eat the old warpaths, spill the huckleberries, cause toadstools to rise like loaves. It will make poets drunk and winos sober, and polish the horns of the slugs. And it will rain a miracle. And it will rain a comfort. And it will rain a sense of salvation from the philistinic graspings of the world. Yes, I am here for the weather. And when I am lowered at last into a pit of marvelous mud, a pillow of fern and skunk cabbage beneath my skull, I want my epitaph to read, IT RAINED ON HIS PARADE, AND HE WAS GLAD!

The girls had to kneel all night on the parade ground waiting to see one of their number punished

With each step, one of them pulled off an earring or a hair extension or a bow and let it fall to the ground, so that by the time they reached the door they had left a trail of glittering accessories behind them. It looked like a grand parade had passed by, and no one had yet come to sweep up the confetti.

This truth is not understood by the U.S. media, or by the pundits, whose ridiculous optimism (or equally ridiculous carping) invariably misses the essential thing itself. Given in a nutshell Groupthink reigns supreme in the U.S. intelligence community where plausible liberals - their brains ground like coffee and percolated through the strainer of the Ivy League - repeatedly find the analytical parade and get in front of it. Instead of penetrating the mind of a distant enemy, they grasp the anxiety of their political overseers, intuiting what is wanted, spitting up a facsimile thereof, and sliding up the career ladder awesomely enabled, impregnably ignorant and numb at heart. Giving them their due, they are innocently unaware of how hopelessly smug and comfortably muddled they've become. Consequently, says Bodansky, there emerged an institutional culture - much like the State Department's culture - that taints and tilts analysis, refusing to confront the possibility of lack of knowledge or errors of judgment.

When tears parade with accurately discipline upon my cheeks and disperse on the ground; I feel its hardship and pain that, teach me not to cause others such situation.

We turn right along and walk along the side of the Parade to look at a long-barrelled cannon about 30 yards away. Known as ‘the Turkish gun’, it was made in 1524, captured during the Egyptian campaign against Napoleon, and installed here in 1801. It is a splendid piece of artillery but achieved notoriety when it nearly became the largest assassination weapon in the world. A couple of years after the gun had been placed here, a man with the appropriate name of Captain Despard formed a conspiracy to assassinate George III while he was reviewing troops here. The cannon, loaded to its full capacity with grapeshot, was to let fly at the Royal coach as it trundled across the parade ground. The conspiracy was discovered in time, which was just as well because it would have blown the coach into a thousand pieces. Have a close look at it and note, on the carriage, the sly crocodile sneaking up on Britannia on the banks of the Nile.

We soon arrive at the sandy trail that leads to the caretaker’s cabin, and the red wolf intern directs people to the parking area. People file out of their cars silently and gather around Kim. She waits till everyone is there and then explains that she is going to walk about a quarter of a mile down the trail to Sandy Ridge, where she’ll howl at the wolves inside. She tells us that sometimes it takes a few howls to get them interested, but we should hold tight and hope that they’ll howl back. Last week, she says, people heard one of the pups howl back. She sets off down the dark path with her flashlight aimed at the ground so as not to spook the wolves. We stand in a pool of weak, wobbly light cast from people’s flashlights and head lamps. The forest darkness encircles us. A few minutes later, we hear Kim’s call pierce the night air. The buzz and drone of insects create a background of uneven noise that I strain to filter out. I hear Kim howl again, and everyone around me seems to be holding their breath and trying not to move. We listen and wait for an answer. Nothing. Kim tries again. No response. I wonder what the people in the crowd are thinking. Is this all just a sham? Just another tourist attraction? Kim makes a fourth howl, and then it starts. A lone howl rises, forlorn and low. It meanders through a few octaves and claws higher and higher. It trails into a thin high-pitched note, and then a second and a third howl pick up at lower pitches. People in the crowd gasp, some lean forward straining to hear. Within thirty seconds, a parade of howls sings loudly from the dark woods. It is hard to believe the wolves are a few hundred yards away. They sound much closer, perhaps less than a hundred feet. Kim walks back to the crowd, flashlight downturned on the ground. Howls waft from somewhere behind her, persistent but not aggressive. The wolves sing. They sing to each other as much as they sing to us. One pitch stands out from the others, higher, thinner, and much lighter. It must be the pup. I imagine him standing next to his parents, watching them throw their heads back and open their jaws wide, letting loose with a call that says, “Here we are! Where are you? Here we are!” And the pup joins in, calling, “I’m here too! I’m here too!” I don’t know exactly what these wolves are saying, of course, but it is difficult to imagine the howling being anything other than a communication to locate other packs or individuals, a way to call out to the night and exclaim: I am here, and I know how to take care of myself so well that I’m going to let you know that I’m here! And my mate is here, and my kids are here. We are all here together in this place that is ours.

The photos hide everything: the twenties that do not roar for the Hoels. The Depression that costs them two hundred acres and sends half the family to Chicago. The radio shows that ruin two of Frank Jr.’s sons for farming. The Hoel death in the South Pacific and the two Hoel guilty survivals. The Deeres and Caterpillars parading through the tractor shed. The barn that burns to the ground one night to the screams of helpless animals. The dozens of joyous weddings, christenings, and graduations. The half dozen adulteries. The two divorces sad enough to silence songbirds. One son’s unsuccessful campaign for the state legislature. The lawsuit between cousins. The three surprise pregnancies. The protracted Hoel guerrilla war against the local pastor and half the Lutheran parish. The handiwork of heroin and Agent Orange that comes home with nephews from ’Nam. The hushed-up incest, the lingering alcoholism, a daughter’s elopement with the high school English teacher. The cancers (breast, colon, lung), the heart disease, the degloving of a worker’s fist in a grain auger, the car death of a cousin’s child on prom night. The countless tons of chemicals with names like Rage, Roundup, and Firestorm, the patented seeds engineered to produce sterile plants. The fiftieth wedding anniversary in Hawaii and its disastrous aftermath. The dispersal of retirees to Arizona and Texas. The generations of grudge, courage, forbearance, and surprise generosity: everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photos’ frame. Inside the frame, through hundreds of revolving seasons, there is only that solo tree, its fissured bark spiraling upward into early middle age, growing at the speed of wood.

It is more than an error, it is an outrage upon the sacred spirit dominant in history, to regard Gaul solely as the parade ground on which Caesar exercised himself and his legions for the impending civil war. Though the subjugation of the west was for Caesar so far a means to an end that he laid the foundations of his later height of power in the Transalpine wars, it is the especial privilege of a statesman of genius that his means themselves are ends in their turn. Caesar needed no doubt for his party aims a military power, but he did not conquer Gaul as a partisan.

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