This chapter's epigraph is from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, entitled "A Tale of Two Cities." In this poem, Longfellow describes a dream in which he is bleeding from a wound on his head. The wound, he says, is caused by the blood of a dead deer. The blood of the deer has drained out of him, and he is no longer human. He is now a blood slave. He explains that soldiers can also become infected by blood tribes on the battlefield, and that soldiers should end themselves before becoming blood slaves.