Georgia, 1898: On what may be the last day of his life, Captain Frederick Benteen - the man who saved portions of Custer's Seventh Cavalry from almost certain death at Little Bighorn - receives a letter from an ambitious boy offering to "restore" his reputation. Over the twenty-three long years since that battle, watching Custer's legend grow, Benteen has brooded silently on the past. His General has been dead for more than twenty years, killed in action, considered a hero, while the public has never forgiven Benteen for surviving. Now, at last, he begins to put down some account of those two horrific days pinned down on a ridge. What follows is an exquisite eulogy for his fellow soldiers, both alive and dead, as Benteen refuses to bow to the demands of legend.
As he begins to write, Benteen finds himself haunted by his lost companions: by Star-Gazer, who joined the army to write poems; mysterious Handsome Jack, who plays the banjo and founded the Grand Order of the Grapefruit - together they form a strange double act, a frontier Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; De Rudio, the gentle German bugler; Young Tom, who stands in his brother Custer's shadow; whimsical Pritzker trapped in dreams; and the Choir, a host of often shocking misfits who hover at the edges of the action.
As Benteen mines deeper into the past, he struggles to untangle his own story, his own worth, from the grand narrative of history. Insistently, he finds himself drawn to the fleeting memories of the "nine-tenths nothing" that make up battle - scraps of men's speech, notes from Star-Gazer's enigmatic journal, jokes, lost thoughts, moments of great beauty and casual violence. Gradually the reader realizes that what Benteen is struggling to recapture, to remember, is a different America, before it began to play out its own history as spectacle, over and over again, as anticipated by that consummate performer, Custer.
As poignant and elegaic as the writing is, it is simultaneously a very funny novel, as when Benteen recalls meeting a nun in New York: she tells him how the monks used to piss in the molten stained glass to achieve a certain milky yellow colour. After this anecdote: "That one thought changed the whole of Europe for him."
Told over the space of a single morning, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers is about death and dying, women and war, growing old, parenthood, friendship and soldierliness. It is about a nation's preoccupation with celebrity, and what, in the end, a life is worth.

Delia Falconer holds a PhD in English literature and cultural studies from the University of Melbourne. In 2003 she was a James Joyce Fellow in Dublin, Trieste and Beijing. Falconer's essays and stories have been anthologised widely in many publications, including Best Australian Essays (1998, 1999, 2003) and Best Australian Stories (1999, 2002); Oxford Australian Love Stories; Penguin Best Australian Short Stories; and The Penguin Century of Australian Short Stories. Her work as an essayist and critic has been sought out by international journals and digests such as nest, Arts and Letters Daily, Landfall, and Courrier International.

He moves indirectly.

At dawn, before he can get to the shaving mirror, he is standing here in the kitchen in his singlet, the wet brush in his hand.

Odd paths his feet take these days, following creases in the daylight. Heading out to shred his pipe plug on the doorstep, he finds himself in the study, staring at the leaning spines of books. He stands by doors and feels the handles. He spends half-days at the windows, his hands in his pockets, his hips against the sills.

There is a slow brown river at the bottom of the garden. For two hours yesterday he watched it, in the middle of the afternoon, when he had intended to close the shutters and take his nap. His wife found him, shoeless, sitting on the landing. Small drops of rain in the dull grey heat around them. An electric hiss on the water's surface. The smell of soil and green things washing from the edges. He took Frabbie's hand and made her lean down to feel the cool airspace, rising, that formed beneath his feet.

The quiet drift of flour to the table. A strange calm at sunrise that he associates with armies.

Lathered up, his braces hanging from his waist, he stands against the kitchen doorway. The maid slaps the bottom of the sieve and stirs the sausage gravy pretending not to see.

Indoors he can feel the river turning over.

The fronts of houses here are blank, the real life centred around the muscle of the water. The town is an afterthought, its main street beginning a quarter-mile from his front door.

His father built this house here, in Georgia , on the riverbank, and named his home �The Shadows'. Ten rooms, thick walls, cold flagstones on the veranda. There are wet hydrangeas beneath the windows, watered already by the staff.

When he was a boy his father showed him on a map how neatly these plantations lined themselves up along the river. A surprise how their straight edges gridded outwards from the banks, since he had only learned the shaded lanes which wound between them. These roads take unpredictable jinks, turn suddenly catty � corner towards the water and loop back, someone told him, because the surveyors who planned them had been drunk. They laid them down through the bone orchards, the cemeteries of the poor. Fragments of collarbone and femur still rise up sometimes, bleached and glowing, after heavy rains.

Often the poor were buried with their silver. That was an unforgettable sound of his childhood, the percussion against carriage wheels of a tarnished candle stick or fork.

Stale pain on his breath � and, he suspects, a more feral stink about the groin. His bladder aches, his skin is goosebumped.

He thinks, I must cellar my body here like rotting fruit.

He has installed a small water closet in his study, behind a screen, so that he does not have to haul him self upstairs as often to the bedroom. He opens the study door and sees the husky outline of his desk, the dull shapes of handguns lined up along the top shelf of a bookcase. Mould and coal-dust in the closed-up air. There are thin bright lines across the window, but he does not open it, he wants to feel shapeless a little longer.

The urge to urinate is constant, the results are always paltry. Lately he has taken to carrying the pan out through the back door to the rose beds, watching the ants run when he pours his trickle on the damp soil near the roots. In New York , in a dark cathedral entrance, an old nun once sold him candy. She told him how the medieval monks would piss in the stained glass when it was molten to produce the creamy yellow. That one thought changed the whole of Europe for him. She had mimed it, leaning backwards, the invisible cock in one clawed hand. Her old eyes were bright, but not salacious. He recognised her as a young girl in a farmyard. He feels a cousin pleasure here, in the thought of his own sluggish fluids emerging perfumed and phosphorescent in those canary-yellow blooms.

He sleeps naked these nights beside his wife, his body as white as those a flood or warfare leave.

His mind also wanders. His life a set of dark rooms which he moves through. Some things he remembers, others he seems to have imagined.
One night in winter, many years ago, when they were tenting in Nebraska, Frabbie wanted him to wake and touch her. So she took an icy handful of lead shot and dropped it in his lap.