Delia Falconer's slim gem of a novel, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, focuses on Frederick Benteen, a captain in General Custer's Seventh Calvary during the Plains Indian Wars. Twenty years after the event, Benteen has started to write an account of the two days when he and his fellow soldiers were pinned down on a ridge and Custer was killed in action. The book takes place over a single morning. It reflects on friendship, growing old, Benteen’s relationship with his wife, the cult of celebrity, death and dying, and war. It's a story that attempts to capture the moments that came in between the seams of this historical battle.

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[Excerpted from The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers]

An afternoon a year before the battle.

They had ridden all day through shallow valleys where they came across the spoor of moose and bears. Signs of the Sioux everywhere, in tent poles and damped-down fire beds, although they never saw them. The creeks they crossed were pebbly, and shaded, and filled with an eternity of logs.

They made camp by the river. From where he sat with Star-Gazer and De Rudio, he could see the Choir and Handsome Jack unpacking. Sully pulled the cougar cub out of his jacket, tied a string around its leg, and jerked it when it tried to totter blindly in among the tree roots. Scruggs picked a blister. Simms did a backflip, then squatted down to contemplate his pack.

After they made camp Benteen walked with Star-Gazer and De Rudio up into the forest, where they came across a mossy clearing. Shsh, De Rudio said, although what disturbed them was the sudden depth of silence. A bird hovered in the sky high above them—Eagle, said Benteen. In the distance they heard Grasshopper Joe sing out a misremembered dance call. De Rudio said, sometimes we forget it is very beautiful here, I think.

A crashing in the scrub. The smell of urine and of coffee came up from the camp, followed by the Choir.

Yeah, it’s so warm and real, said Handsome Jack, it’s running down my leg.

They saw the Sioux woman at the same time, where she had pulled herself into the low scrub. She had a compound fracture of the left thigh and from the way the blue flesh had pulled back from the bone, and the way she only followed them with her fierce eyes, it was clear she had been there for some time. At the sight of her Simms did two backflips in quick succession, with his mouth agape. Ambrose said, “Fish bait,” and poked her jaw with his toothpick. Before they could take a breath Sully had bent at her throat with the knife and it was done.Burton sneezed as he opened up her blanket. He looked up to Handsome Jack, who smiled indulgently, then nodded, and gave a mild Nyow.

When they had finished, the cub sniffed and chewed sideways on a piece of something. Ambrose the Bilk stamped the woman’s pelvis. The bone broke with a low, sudden squeak. Guess she was a grunter, not a groaner, Handsome Jack said.

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This scene appears nearly halfway through the book and is perhaps one of the most beautiful examples of Falconer's writing. It is also the most unflinching and brutal moment in the novel. Almost akin to Japanese fiction in its spare and elegant attention to landscape detail and sound, the scene is particularly shocking as the characters involved in the incident – dreamy Star-Gazer who joined the war to write poetry, the charming but crude Handsome Jack who keeps the camp entertained with his jokes, the reflective captain Benteen, and the gentle Rudio – have all appeared in much more favorable light earlier in the novel. Then, stunningly, the men act in this horrifying manner while even Benteen looks on.

On this turning point, Falconer says the scene took her by surprise when she wrote it and that she even had second thoughts about including it due to this type of misogyny. Ultimately, however, she felt it was necessary, and in some ways perhaps the key scene in the book. She says: "...Men at war have to learn to acclimatize to the constant threat of violence and have to be prepared to do terrible things to one another – and part of the point of Handsome Jack and the others' jokes and games has been to find a way of diffusing and channeling this threat...And I agree – what makes this scene so shocking is that these are at other times men who are capable of being quite charming, but that for me was the point. Benteen becomes exercised over the question of where our 'true' selves lie – is the man who participates in this terrible thing the 'real' Handsome Jack, or is his 'real' self suddenly revealed here? That question interests me too... I think if we’re going to commit ourselves to wars, it's important to acknowledge that the sheer brute facts of wars complicate the possibility that there can ever be clear-cut ‘heroes.’ We ask men to accept a certain level of violence as part of their daily lives, but then draw the line. And yet the fact is that wars take place, very frequently, away from public overview."

Falconer also says the Japanese feel of her novel and in this passage in particular was intentional: "One of the books that I had in the back of my mind when writing was Junichiro Tanizaki's Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, about medieval Japanese samurai culture...it gives such a convincing vision of the sexual dimension of battlefield violence, but without any overt psychoanalysis. It maintains its horrible mystery, and in a way that doesn't make light of it...Because the American story had been told so often I wanted to give it something of the estrangement and elegance of Japanese fiction, in order to hopefully renew its power to move and shock us."

Much of Falconer's book is less intense than this passage, and even at times wildly funny and bawdy. At one point, we learn that Benteen and his wife posted pubic hairs to one another, referring to them as "wild thyme," something that didn't actually come from the author's imagination but was a detail in a letter from Benteen to his wife that Falconer came across in her research. Another story, also surprisingly true, involves a dinosaur constructed out of feces and matchsticks left perched on a toilet – this was something that Austrialian writer, James Bradley – a friend of Falconer’s – once saw in a nightclub bathroom. It's a joke that Handsome Jack tells, characteristic of his crass humor.

"Jokes, silences, moments of unspoken sublimity, glimpses of beauty, idleness are all vital parts of life. These things tend to be written out of history, but they're what...can help us understand it,” says Falconer. And in the end, it is her attention to these “in-between” moments that give The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers its originality and power. "I wanted to continually place strands against one another so that they would resonate against each other, and build in intensity – sour, sweet, gentle, violent – until the book's conclusion. What I would like people to take away is a sense of afterglow, a feeling for the brief, palpable weight of these human lives."