"Maudit anglais (american, serb, etc...)!"

When his tale had been told and he saw that Robert didn't comprehend [what he'd said in Flemish], he began it again in French. Robert knew it was French because he recognised that vaches were cows. But that was all. 'Can't you speak English?' He asked politely. This was the wrong thing to say. The man threw down his hat and began to shout.
"Enklesh! Enklesh! Vous etes anglais? Maudit anglais!" he screamed. Robert became alarmed. He backed his horse away but the man pursued him. 'Maudit anglais!!' he kept shouting. He picked up his hat and threw it. 'Ce sont tous des assassins!' he cried [p.71].

The farmer had approached Robert asking him if he'd seen his cows, which he'd lost that morning. For the peasant, whose livlihood could possibly have been commandeered, or caught in the line of fire by these foreign troops, the language barrier seems to serve as the final straw in his frustrations. It is likely that the peasant has few political views, as he has spent his entire life in the fields, quite unaffected by Bismarck's intricate house-of-card building, and the delicate diplomacy that came crashing down with it in the flurry of empiric intentions. His life was his cows. And now it was being destroyed by these Englishmen who had invaded his countryside.

To the peasant, 'they are all murderers', every last Englishman. His only perception of these men is that their purpose is to get close enough to shoot at other human beings, and insodoing, devastate his fields and quite possibly pillaged his livestock. He shall never see the English counterpart to his style of life.

Stourbridge St.Aubyn's is...a village about seventeen miles from Cambridge on the river stour. The river rises at Cambridgeshire and empties into the Northsea at Harwich. For most of its journey, it constitutes the border between Essex and Suffolks. The countryside is among the most beautiful in the world - being flat and made up of those lush green fields - hedges spires and hedges that define the word 'English.' Spring in this region has no equal anywhere. The fields are filled with black and white cows - the riverbanks are filled with yellow flowers - larks fly up in endless song - and rain, when it falls is soft and warm. Here are...roads that wind past the naked swimmers in the ponds and deposit you at innyards where the smell of ale and apples makes you drunk before you've past the gate. It is an old world, defined by centuries of slow-motion [p. 144].

Although wars are declared on diplomatic grounds, the angry prejudices filter into the bedrock below the very fields of the commonfolk, contaminating the crop of following generations. Wars suck out the humanity from human interaction, so that the people of the 'other' side can't imagine that they could ever relate to you and your culture that is clearly built on malicious intentions to destroy their peace and quiet.

And this is why Findley called his work the Wars - in the plural. This is one of the truths about war that rings true wherever it is fought, inevitably dragging civilians into the conflict, from Belgium to Baghdad to the Balkans.