ome a soldier in order to be free, and his father answers, "Free? Free to do what, Sam? Free to mock your King? To shoot your neighbor? To make a mess of thousands of lives?" (Collier 7). The Colliers show that the big war is really the little differences between people, between Sam, who feels the need for freedom, and Life, who does not feel restricted by being a British subject.
Another example of the theme occurs when Tim finds out what happened to his father. He knows Life was ambushed by thieves when he rode ahead to check out the road home; Tim could see the tracks in the snow and guess what had happened. However, he does not discover his father's ultimate fate until months later, when he hears that Life somehow ended up on a British prison ship (even though he was captured by rebels) and died of cholera. Although he had not yet decided whose side he was really on, now "it seemed to me that everybody was to blame, and I decided that I wasn't going to be on anybody's side any more: neither one of them was right" (Collier 167). Many other people probably felt the same way, though for different reasons, which is why the war took so long to finish, but, in this book, Tim's story is more important than the bigger story.
A third example of the theme is the way the book ends, with Sam's execution. As far as Tim is concerned, the war is now over, though he acknowledges that it went on for three more years after that. He never joined either one of the armies, so the war just was not importan
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