Now, now that we understand what the battlefield might look like, we have to ask, what does it feel like? Let's look at the level of the soldier, what is the inner landscape of the soldier feel like? What is the soldier thinking of? What is the soldier going through as they're going through this experience of battle. Now, I'm basing the following lectures on readings of memoirs, of reading biographies, some psychological accounts, descriptions of battle probably too many war movies. And I'm trying to reduce these down to a few principles in order to communicate what this experience would, would be like. And the two words that I've come up with are confusion and loneliness. The first one is confusion. Few soldiers know where they are. Few soldiers have no idea what they are doing in this battle. Very nicely captured in this picture, see this man sort of wondering, scratching his head, why am I here. What's going on? What's happened to, to these people? So, there's a sense of just not knowing what's coming, where you've been, or where you're going. In fact, physically not knowing where you are. Until the 20th century, access to maps was very, very limited, and most of the time most soldiers would have had absolutely no idea of where they were. Not just in the sense of the immediate battle, but even into a large geographical zone. They would simply not have known where they were fighting, or and this is very important, how they could get home. Add to this sense of confusion, the massive amount of smoke and dust that contribute to this confusion. Being in a space in where visibility is extremely limited, or being in a space that's very rare, that looks different from what it should. My favorite example is this urban fighting in, in the case of Stalingrad for example. Imagine trying to go through these streets that don't look like streets anymore but have enough of a remainder so you're confused by the similarity and the difference, meanwhile you have all this dust, you have massive amounts of noise. Moreover, you're exhausted. Every single account of soldiering talks about tiredness, talks about being exhausted, about not being able to keep one's eyes open. In fact, many soldiers' fantasies are simply about sleeping. Might be also about sex, it might also be about eating, but sleep, the possibility of simply lying down. In here we see this on the trench. Here someone is still waiting. But these comrades don't look like they're dead. They're actually just sleeping, taking this small moment, small moment when they can relax and they can go somewhere else. The other great emotion we've talked about is loneliness, the existential loneliness of facing death. This is something that awaits us all, but that for soldiers is very, very immediate. There is this idea that when you die, no matter who is around you, you will die alone. Perhaps and romantically accompanied by your loyal horse but in the end alone or injury, injury so incapacitating, injury so destructive that one can't feel that the urge for living anymore. So there is this fear of this confusion, there's this fear of this loneliness. Is it any, any surprise then that the need for companionship under these desperate conditions is, is particularly found among soldiers. This need for friendship, this need for a hand, this need for just a gentle touch to remind oneself that one is not alone, that if one is confused, there's someone else who might know, if one is alone, there's at least the possibility of another human reaching out. [BLANK_AUDIO]