Elliot no longer looked like an eager young officer. Unshaven for days, hollow-eyed and with deep lines on his haggard face, he had aged ten years in the nine months since the siege had begun.
"That was a bad day at the Redan," he said. He poured something cloudy into a glass and drank it, added more and sipped before passing the bottle to Jack.
"What"s this?" Jack sniffed at the bottle and screwed up his face.
"God only knows, and I don"t care. Some kill-me-deadly concoction the Sawnies distilled out of corpses and swill." Elliot swallowed some without any change of expression. "It does the job."
"And what job is that?" Jack asked.
When Elliot looked up, his eyes were glazed. "It takes me away from this god-awful place," he said. "Every time I sleep, I see the dead, pointing accusing
