MARY: “Ever since the Armistice, the churches have been empty and the dance halls full. You’d think we fought the war for the right to be frivolous.”

STEPHEN: “And what did we fight for?”

MARY: “Stephen!”

STEPHEN: “No, go on, tell me.”

MARY: “You know full well!”

STEPHEN: “Tell me it was for king and country, for honor and freedom. I’d like to remember that. [pause] Because when you’re there, with that noise in your head, and you’re stepping over corpses so you can run and hide, then you’re fighting for just one thing; to stay alive. [pause] You talk to a man, sitting there in the cold, and you tell him everything. Your whole life. Things you’d never said before. And then you’d find that man with a bullet in his head.”

– Stephen Bannerman, speaking with his grandmother, Mary Bannerman, shortly after returning to England from the front lines of World War I. The Grand, (1997) episode 1