Without armour, he´s a snail without a shell. Useless. But then he thinks perhaps there is something he can do. And so he climbs on to the parapet above the trench and standing there, outlined against the sky, sends his terrible war cry ringing across the battlefield all the way up to the gates of Troy.
[...]
On the battlefield, the Greeks fighting to save Patroclus´ corpse recognize the cry and turn towards it. What do they see? A tall man standing on a parapet with the golden light of early evening catching his hair? No, of course they don´t. The see the goddess Athena wrap her glittering aegis around his shoulders; they see flames thirty feet high springing from the top of this his head. What the Trojans saw isn´t recorded. The defeated go down in history and disappear, and their stories die with them. Three times Achilles shouts and three times the Trojans fall back, the last time long enough for the Greeks to pull Patroclus´ body clear and carry it back to their camp.
I really enjoy reading this book, but I have some issues with it which I will elaborate on as soon as I have finished the book. But Pat Barker gets this epical feel of the Iliad down pat, I´m really loving the way she writes.
I´m really sad that Patroclus is dead, though. As much as I´m indifferent towards his character in all the other books and movies I have read / watched about the Trojan war, I really liked his character in this book.
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