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If I knew how to end a conversation, if I could distinguish true truths, personal truths from instinctive truths, I would have disentangled the threads for you before tying them up or arranging them so that the story of this book would be clear between us. But I have followed the advice of the painter Louis Boudreault, who advised me to play with the threads in the artwork he created for this book. Some threads stayed where they were despite the veering to the left and the ups and downs when the painting was moved from Monsieur Boudreault's studio to my home. Others imposed themselves by coming away from the canvas in the middle of the night, as I listened to the silences and testimonies of the soldiers, the combatants, and those who refused to fight; while I erased thousands of words in blocks, in paragraphs, in sentences, so as not to underscore some, to highlight others too boldly, and in the end to betray the delicate balance that maintains us in love. And in life.