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Volic cursed feast, volic cursed feast, which is of course Dutch, a Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas.

So we're doing these bonus episodes out of we have ways of making you talk,

and we're taking turns to read extracts from some of our favourite World War II books.

Yep.

And your first 23rd of December, what's it going to be?

Well, I thought in the spirit of seasonal exhaustion, I'd read a passage from Zeno's The Cauldron,

where I, he's not the hero, but he's the protagonist.

Bridgman is, it's towards the end of the battle in the used to big perimeter,

and Bridgman is very, very tired.

The air hung nearly as thickly as the puffs of smoke,

which drifted heavily around the edges of the perimeter,

marking its limits as clearly as a crayon line on a map.

In shattered buildings and from the holes dug in the gardens of the houses,

from the borders positions in the fields, and from those of the glider pilots under the trees,

the division fought on.

Battalions reduced to tens of men, companies to single figures,

platoon positions held by five or six men,

sectioned posts, manned by pairs, and sometimes by a single soldier.

Each man alone, no man in Ireland, all tied together by the threat of the general's command,

the despair in their hearts hidden, or at worst partially concealed from each other.

The dead blankness of exhaustion, masking their faces to a uniform, dirty, grey-yellowness.

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