In 1999, when overnight I quit a good job to write The Devil That Danced on the Water, I did so in the grip of a fury. From the United Kingdom I had watched my paternal country of Sierra Leone, finally and after decades of oppression, erupt in a violence that had simmered too long.

For months my stepmother had lived with me in my London home as a refugee. Inside Sierra Leone a decade had passed in which no one had made contact with the remainder of my father’s family, who were caught behind rebel lines in the north of the country. When the government in Sierra Leone declared it was safe to return, I had put my stepmother on a plane home, a terrible mistake as it turned out.

Within weeks the rebel army of the RUF began what was intended as the final onslaught on Freetown. They called it “Operation No Living Thing.” On the telephone to my stepmother I heard the shells exploding nearby, the gunfire of the advancing rebel soldiers. All of this made me feel desperate and very afraid, but it was not the cause of my fury.

The fury came from listening to and watching the reports of the war by the Western press, who salivated over stories of mutilation, rape, child soldiers, forced marriage, and especially cannibalism, of which there were multiple accounts. What was missing was any apparent effort to understand or to report the causes of the war. There was no context, no history, no politics, just the senseless violence with which Africa had long been associated. I was then a reporter at BBC TV. My beat, though, was British politics and current affairs. The BBC was not the worst offender, by any means.

When I let it be known that I was from Sierra Leone, at least one correspondent sought my advice. Once I called in from home and corrected the pronunciation of Magburaka, where my father spent part of his childhood, while the presenter was on air. For another correspondent, I translated interviews with my people caught up in the January 6 invasion of Freetown. Still, even within the most responsible news organizations, there seemed to be little interest in the question of why this was happening.

Elsewhere, the world went on with its business. Barely a soul asked after my family, even among those whom I considered my friends. Perhaps Sierra Leone seemed too remote a land to appear as more than an abstraction, or perhaps the absence of peril in the lives of most of my London friends resulted in a failure of imagination. I know now that my experience is shared by many people who endure war remotely, whether those people are returning combatants or refugees.

War in Sierra Leone had been turned into a spectacle without ever becoming a tragedy.

I have often been asked how long it took me to write The Devil That Danced on the Water and I have replied that it took me two years and a lifetime. Two years, because that was the duration of time in which I researched and wrote it, as the furies snapped at my heels. A lifetime, because sometimes you have to see enough of the world to begin to understand it.

In her Nobel Prize speech, published later as the essay “Witness: The Inward Testimony,” Nadine Gordimer describes the task of the writer as the “transformation of events, motives, reactions, from the immediacy into the enduring significance that is meaning.” And it was this “meaning,” viewed through the lens of subsequent events and the shock of war, at which it took me twenty-five years to arrive.

Following publication of the book, I returned to Sierra Leone year upon year. I gave talks at the schools and universities. I remember the first young man, a student, who approached me to tell me that he had heard me speak at Fourah Bay College and had then gone to talk to his parents. “Are these things true?” he had wanted to know. And his parents had replied, “Yes, they are true.” Then the young man had asked them why they had never told him and his parents had replied, “Because we were afraid.” This is the silence of oppression.

From that time on many young people came up to me in the street, or in a restaurant or store, or else wrote to me. All told the same story as the first young man, a story that they had never known. The silence of a generation had been broken. In time the history books used to teach schoolchildren in Sierra Leone would be rewritten to include the events related in The Devil That Danced on the Water.

A ‘meaning’ I have derived from writing this book is that certain patterns of historical events, sometimes including but not limited to cowing people into silence and terrorized inaction, could be repeated anywhere. What had begun as a quest to discover the truth behind my father’s murder would grow into a twenty-year investigation into the causes and effects of civil conflict.

In 2017, by then teaching at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., I was invited to lunch with Hillary Clinton shortly after she had lost the election to Donald Trump. I was seated next to one of her advisers, who listened with interest as I described my writing and where it had led me. I told her what I had learned of the signs of incipient and growing authoritarianism: control of the press and judiciary, co-option of the loyalty of the police and the army, rise of militias, manipulation of elections.

There was one more element, most crucially: a transformational leader, someone both charismatic and deadly. In the case of Sierra Leone this had been Foday Sankoh. In Yugoslavia the ambitions of Slobodan Milošević had placed the country on the course to war. The woman appeared to be listening with a great deal of interest. So, I concluded, these were the reasons I was worried about the United States of America.

My companion looked at me and frowned, then she swatted the air with the back of her hand and pronounced: “Not in freedom-loving America!” I wonder what she thinks now. Even then, Donald Trump had begun to discredit the mainstream press and to promote his own ‘truth’ on social media. He was wooing the military by bringing generals into his administration and was seeking control of the judiciary by appointing federal judges at breakneck speed.

Four years after that conversation, on the day before the invasion of the Capitol on (coincidentally also) January 6, I sent a text to an American friend in London: “Are you ready for the coup?” I was only half joking. He would later ask me how I’d known, and all I could say is that I had spent a long time thinking about the ways in which a country strays from the path of peace.

In Sierra Leone in the 1980s, even as war raged in neighboring Liberia, people did not believe it could happen to us. We Sierra Leonians saw ourselves as essentially peace-loving, even if our leaders were venal. If anything, our problem was that we were too passive. But when things begin, they must begin somewhere. There is a schema, one that might be traced from the first flap of the butterfly’s wings to the hurricane.

On a noticeboard in my office, for a long time, I had taped a handwritten note to myself with the lines “Nonfiction reveals the lies, but only metaphor can reveal the truth,” which is true, I think, of a certain type of story. Two novels set in Sierra Leone followed The Devil That Danced on the Water. I continued to explore the themes of civil conflict in fiction.

Fiction allowed me to reach for a deeper, less literal kind of truth. Ancestor Stones took the reader back to pre-colonial times to examine the century-long antecedents of state collapse. The Memory of Love examined the immediate prelude and the aftermath to the war and the silence of censorship, of self-censorship, of trauma, but also of complicity. How did a generation account for their actions, or inaction, to the generation whom they had failed?

The road to conflict may be long or short. Sometimes countries find their way back. Certain events may tip a country finally into war, chief among them an economic crisis. In time, my attention moved out of Africa and turned to the former Yugoslavia for the reason that the war that led to the collapse of that union had been almost exactly contemporaneous with the war in Sierra Leone (Yugoslavia 1991–2001; Sierra Leone 1991–2002). Though just as savage, the Yugoslav conflict had been reported completely differently, with both causes and consequences analyzed in forensic detail.

The war in the former Yugoslavia encompassed several nations. I chose to concentrate on Croatia, because there were striking parallels between Croatia and Sierra Leone. The first is size: Sierra Leone is 22,000 square miles, Croatia 28,000. At the start of the wars in 1991, the population of each country was around 4 million. Both are coastal countries of outstanding natural beauty, with a chiefly peasant population and a rural economy supplemented by tourism. Then, of course, there is the key similarity, the one that drew me in the first place—both nations had endured decades of authoritarianism, followed by economic free fall and, finally, civil war.

I have friends from the former Yugoslavia and we talked about our similar experiences. I was interested, too, in the differences. The war in Sierra Leone had never gone down ethnic or nationalist lines, despite the misreporting of the war as “tribal.”

In contrast the war in Yugoslavia had indeed been fought along viciously exploited ethnic divides. The war in Sierra Leone had begun after thirty years of exploitation of people and resources by a corrupt regime; it had been a slow burn. The war in Yugoslavia had been, comparatively, fast burning. A friend who had reported there commented: “The reason those wars kicked off so fast was because every man had a gun and knew how to use it.” This helped answer my question about speed. Men in Yugoslavia had been obliged to do military service, making for a supply of trained citizens who could be recruited into the militias that characterized that war. A nation in which guns are easily available is a tinderbox relative to one in which people have little access to high-powered weaponry.

My friend’s remark led me to understand something else, too. The war in the former Yugoslavia became a sniper’s war. Civilians were shot and killed by the thousands in cities under siege by men in the surrounding hills. Yugoslavia was a nation of hunters; Sierra Leone is a nation of farmers. The war in Sierra Leone had been characterized by amputations: the rebel army hacked off people’s limbs. When people go to war they pick up the weapon at hand, be it a machete or a rifle.

As time went by I became interested in the ways in which a population survives the aftermath of a civil conflict, when you must continue to live side by side with your enemy (as in the case of Sierra Leone) or with the knowledge of what you have done to them (as in the case of the former Yugoslavia, where communities were ‘ethnically cleansed’ in the form of mass deportation and murder).

In The Memory of Love, two of my main characters are trauma specialists, and in the years of writing those books I spent many hundreds of hours talking to victims and those who try to help them. Early in my research, a Sierra Leonian psychiatrist had remarked to me, “These people will be all right, you know.” He was talking about the mental health of most of the population over the medium to long term. He thought that trauma diagnoses were being applied too widely and too quickly, in particular by Western aid workers.

His views echoed those of the French psychologist Boris Cyrulnik. Cyrulnik lost his parents in the Holocaust and worked professionally with many survivors of genocide. He challenged the orthodoxy that pain necessarily equals trauma. Instead, he argued that emotional vulnerability could be transformed into emotional strength. He called this ‘resilience.’

In May of 2014, I received an email from a woman asking if she might put me in touch with a former political detainee from Sudan. Sudan was then under the rule of the longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir. In 2013, Ezekiel (the name he used) and three other men had been arrested and charged with treason. They were held in custody at the National Security Headquarters, where on many days they heard rifles being fired within the compound, which they feared were the sounds of prisoners being executed.

One day a guard gave the prisoners each a copy of The Devil That Danced on the Water with the order to read it. The men did as they were instructed, but they also took to discussing the book among themselves. They saw the obvious parallels between their story and that of my father, and they concluded that both the book and the gunfire were part of a process of psychological intimidation. “They were trying to tell us that the same fate awaited us as had awaited your father.” But far from inviting despair, the book “had the opposite effect.” It renewed the strength of their convictions. They promised that, when and if they were ever released, they would find the author of this book and tell her about the inspiration they had derived from it.

Following the collapse of the government case against them, Ezekiel fled into exile. Soon afterwards he began his search for me. Omar al-Bashir, the dictator, would eventually be unseated in a popular uprising in 2019.

A positive temperament, an inclination to humor, the passage of time, being surrounded by people who care but do not “catastrophize” and by a society that does not turn every adversity into an existential question (why me?) but accepts that sometimes “shit happens”—all these factors help. In the end most of us develop the characteristics that help us overcome the bad things that have happened. Thus, my twenty-year enquiry into the causes and effects of civil conflict ended with a novel called Happiness.

To write a memoir is to live in the minds of readers as the person you were in the pages of the book, all of which leads me to a question readers often ask me. What happened to the members of my family after the events in the book were over? Here is the answer. In my father’s last will, written shortly before he was executed, he stated the wish that we children should be reunited with our mother. An international search for her took place, about which we, the children, were kept mostly in ignorance until one day we were summoned before a lawyer and asked if we remembered anything at all about our grandparents in Aberdeen. Anything at all, he said, perhaps the part of town where they lived? To which we replied: “Gran and Grandad live at 38 Gairn Terrace.” And so our mother, who was living in Zambia with her husband, the New Zealander, was found.

My mother is now in her eighties and retired in New Zealand. My brother and sister both have families of their own. Morlai, along with my husband, Simon, and myself, established a primary school in Rogbonko, a village founded by my grandfather where my father was born. Immediately following the war and the years of missed schooling, not a single child was able to read or write. Today Rogbonko Village School boasts university graduates among its alumni. And as for my stepmother, Yabome, she has lived quietly and contentedly in Sierra Leone ever since.

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From The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest (20th Anniversary Edition) by Aminatta Forna. Copyright © 2023. Available from Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic.

This piece was written in 2014 and published in English in the 2016 issue of Freeman’s. Translated from the Arabic by Wiam el-Tamami.

To be clear, I don’t like mobile phones at all. But when my family and I arrived in Ramallah, a friend gave me one in case of emergencies. Even so, when it starts to ring, suddenly, at 8:29 on this morning in mid-July, I let it go until my partner picks it up. He goes quiet and holds the phone out to me, pressing it to my left ear. It’s a recorded message, delivered in a booming voice speaking in formal Arabic. I catch only a few words: “. . . You have been duly warned. The Israeli Defense Forces . . .” Then the message ends and the line goes dead. I freeze.

This is the kind of call made by the Israeli Army when it is about to bombard a residential building. The moment someone answers the call, they relinquish their right to accuse the army of war crimes, as they have been “duly warned.” The strike can take place within a half hour of the call.

Just yesterday I heard about a young man receiving a warning call like this, informing him that the building where he lived in the north of Gaza would be bombed. The young man was at work in the south at the time. He tried to call his family but could not reach them. He left work and rushed home, but found the building destroyed. Some of his family members were wounded; others had been killed.

I don’t know whether this incident really took place. One hears a lot of stories these days, some too awful to believe. But here it is, at 8:29 a.m., pouncing on me like my destiny.

I’m not sure who this phone belongs to exactly, or who the Israeli Army thinks it belongs to. I wonder if my friend might be part of some political group. I doubt it. I make a quick mental survey of the neighbors, trying to guess which of them might be “wanted.” The only people I’ve encountered since we arrived two weeks ago in Ramallah are annoying children aged four to eleven; two middle-aged women and an elderly one; and a man in his late fifties. None of this puts my fears to rest. Their profiles do not differ much from those of the victims of recent air strikes. And then I realize, with dread, that I’ve become a replica of an Israeli Army officer, pondering which of these Palestinians might represent a “security threat.”

My partner is still standing in front of me, and behind him our eight-year-old daughter has now appeared. Our son, three months old, is sleeping in the next room. My partner, who has limited Arabic, asks me what the call was about. I look at him, then at our curious daughter. I try to find something to say, but I am overcome by a feeling of helplessness.

I look at the number again. I could press a button and call the “Israeli Defence Forces” back. Or I could send a text message. I could at least voice my objection to this planned attack. But when I try to think of what I could say or write, I feel numb, knowing that the words that will pour out of me will be useless. This realization, that words cannot hold and that they are wholly feeble when I need them the most, is crushing. The Israeli Army can now call my mobile phone to inform me of its intention to bomb my house, but my tongue is struck dumb.

After telling our daughter to get ready I go to the room where our three-month-old is sleeping. We have less than a half hour to leave the house. I walk into the darkness of the room and stare at the wall. I begin to notice a strange, intensely black cube high up on the wall. I don’t understand what that cube is doing there. I am sure that the wall is white; it’s not possible that a part of it has suddenly turned black. I scan the room for other dark cubes that might have crept into it while I was outside. Finally my eyes fall on a dot of green light at the end of the computer adapter, in front of which a pile of books stands. The light emanating from that tiny dot has cast the shadow of the books on the opposite wall, creating that black cube.

That tiny green dot of light, as faint as it seems, barely visible, was able to throw me into another abyss of fear. Perhaps my terror following that phone call is also exaggerated. Before my daughter and I leave the house as we do every day—she to her summer camp, and I to the university to my students—I look at my partner and our three-month-old child. Will this be the last time I see them?

We go down the stairs, without meeting any of the neighbors or their children, so I stall in the hope of picking up some noises from behind their closed doors. I hesitate for a moment, wondering whether I should ring one of their doorbells to ask if they received a similar call. But I keep walking behind my daughter until we leave the building. Then I look at the fifth floor and at the sky, trying to detect any sound or movement of drones or fighter jets. So far, nothing. We continue down the road to catch a cab from the main street.

As we reach it, the morning bustle of the main street embraces me. I calm down slightly, thinking it might have been a mistaken call, or one intended as a general warning to everyone, and not specifically to me and my family. But once we get inside the cab, fear overtakes me again. I ask the driver to turn the radio on.

For the next half hour, there will only be news about bombings of buildings in Gaza, with none in Ramallah.

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The final issue of Freeman’s, a collection of writings on conclusions, features work from Rebecca Makkai, Aleksandar Hemon, Rachel Khong, Louise Erdrich, and more, is available now.

Editor’s note: Given the ongoing war in Ukraine, Literary Hub is amplifying its coverage of Ukrainian writers this month. The following is an excerpt from Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love, which “tells the story of Haba Habinsky, a refugee from Ukraine’s Donbas region, who has escaped to the capital city of Kyiv at the onset of the Ukrainian-Russian war,” according to the book’s publisher.

*

What could be the essence of all of this, O master? Haba breathed in the frigid Kyiv air and pondered how this year’s autumn had been so warm and yet the cold came so quickly, seemingly out of nowhere, and how this was a real mind-fuck. Well what then could be the essence of all of this? And what is the Ukrainian essence, if you compare it with, say, the Russian one? Of course, the Ukrainian essence, if it is our national one, should be different from the essential essence, so to say, of the enemy? Right? Or are there certain philosophical coordinates where the national disappears and the essentially human sets out upon its difficult and senseless path? Can we suppose that Russians are inhuman? That Ukrainians, for example, are humans while Russians are—the reverse (the re-verse—what a wonderful word; re-creation? A time of reproduction? And Jesus said to them, “Truly, I say to you, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me in the re-creation will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel).1 And if we are to accept this, well then how about the French or, more generally, the Europeans? How do you co-exist with them? All those Sartres, Camus, and Levis—what are they, biologically speaking? Deleuze, Derrida, Barthes. And Darwin in particular (Charles Robert Darwin)? And where the hell did this curious theologian come from? And couldn’t some virtuous person have showed up and bashed his bones with a baseball bat to stop him from writing that idiocy of his about people and monkeys having common relatives? Well tell me this, Mr. Theologian. Do you get a kick out of a monkey and wise men having common relatives?

Of course not, it’s all very clear. Homo sapiens—or, as it is proper to say now, Homo sapiens sapiens—with all your sadness and intoxication, well, who haven’t you slept with, you loser, especially in those knotty 1990s. And what then can be said about the 2000s and 2010s, which were filled to the rim with fire.

You know, sometimes things line up in such a way that it becomes unbearable. The soul gets torn by a sense that life is expiring and pulling away from you, like the nighttime local train to Publiieve-Neronove (the same as Klavdiieve-Tarasove, a small town in the Borodiansk district of Kyiv oblast. Founded in 1903, located 1,440.71 miles from Paris. At the fork, stay to the right and continue on A4/E25/E50; follow the signs toward Paris/Luxembourg/Thionville), which flickers its phantom fires. And, moreover, a spiritual development doesn’t come at all. You look back into past days and they are empty, and instead of a greater awareness ringing in the radiance of a fullness of existence, you are left with the bland, concrete slice of cake of a provincial railway platform. Empty packs of cigarettes, sunflower seed shells, a half-empty bottle of Chernihiv Light beer, a homeless dude on a bench reading Conan Doyle. The wind spreads yellow dust. And, standing up to your ears in that dust, you come to understand that you haven’t done anything worthy in your life (existence is bleeding to death, looking into you with the sad eyes of dead relatives and folk tale characters).

And it is in that state that sapiens sapiens drifts through the woods. In that state. And there’s a monkey sleeping there. Can you believe it, dear compatriots? This guy is preoccupied with existence, while the monkey just fucking sleeps. This guy’s sadness has got him by the balls, while the monkey, drunk off champagne, lies beneath the walnut tree. The bodhisattvas of Ukraine. Each in its own manner, of course. And that is where relatives come from.

It would be better for this Darwin to ask whom his mother slept with. This theologian. Why is he picking on monkeys? There are so many animals in our society that that spiel about monkeys—it’s not even half the truth. It’s only a quarter of the problem. I wonder why he didn’t write anything about those wild boars, crows, hedgehogs, rats, butterflies, dragonflies, dogs and wolves, bears, snakes, laughing and crying hyenas, and just a few innocent woodpeckers, that make up our political scene? It’s a real frog-fest, this parliament.

“But why is it Darwin that I am attacking?” Haba suddenly wondered.

Why not Martin Luther? And the fact that he’s German doesn’t mean anything. Germans, actually, are the same way, except that they are fonder of order. If you should break some sort of law, like, for example, deciding to take a leak in the middle of the Brandenburg Gate, then your friend-bursche, with whom you had just been downing beers in a bar, will turn you in to the police, you can be sure of that. Even if you were a proponent of, say, anarcho-radicalism.

“So then, what is all this leading to?”

Well, who knows, master, what this is all leading to, Haba shrugged his shoulders, but I am learning a language. A language so musical and magical. One that leads you to all kinds of nonsense and multicolored idiocy, it calls you to March madness, to holy hollow November. You can mumble non-stop about anything in this language for a hundred thousand years, and speak gobbledygook with your tangled, refugee tongue. (Gobelen? Gusk? Let’s home in on that rabbit and his balls).

And it is at this moment that Haba thought that, perhaps, he is beginning to develop a polyglot syndrome. While talking to himself only in his native Russian, he remained an average Joe. But when he began learning a second language, all sorts of God-knows-what began entering his brain. From much knowledge, there is much despair.

“That is the fate of today’s intellectuals,” he said to himself, sighed heavily, and, with a dawdling sadness, breathed the lively air of perpetual expulsion into his greying beard, made the sign of the cross, and continued strolling down Obolon Avenue.

Well, what the heck can you do, it’s autumn. Autumn. And what is autumn? It is the onset of a turning point. The sky cries in blood beneath your feet. And stupid crows scuttle through the puddles. Kyivan crows, fucking eh. “So then,” Haba mumbled, “why the hell didn’t you, Mr. Pushkin, tell us anything? You were a pretty decent chap. And talented. If you saw a Jew, you would say to him: look at the Jew. If you saw a babe, then you’d say: ababahalamaha. And then you’d grab her by her skirt. Come here, sugar. He brought her to his corner, wrung his hands, sat her tied-up on a stool and said to her in perfect German: I am your Sacher-Masoch, mein daaarling. I brought you to the City of the Lion itself. I’ll start telling your tales, calling you pannochka, you’ll be a sexually satisfied chick. You’ll become a true halychanka. But she says to him: go fuck yourself, you perverted horse, damn you! I ain’t no halychanka, I’m the French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of postNapoleonic French life, is generally viewed as my magnum opus. And I have such long, curly hair, because I curl it on giant nails forged in a metallurgic guild, and that’s how I sleep, after drinking Marsala and smoking weed. I wake up in the morning looking flawlessly beautiful.

And I could share this good fortune with you.

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Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love by Volodymyr Rafeyenko, translated by Mark Andryczyk, is available via Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

It is Leningrad 1938. A long line of women, wrapped up against the cold, is queuing at the gates of Kresty prison, on the Arsenalnaya bank of the Neva River. The women wait every day and the gates often remain shut against them. Some have been coming to stand in the queue for as long as 18 months. They do not even know if their men are still confined there or have simply disappeared. The line keeps growing. It is in the middle of the Yezhov terror: every night brings new arrests. Usually the women do not speak, knowing they cannot trust anyone. They just stand in a frozen torpor, waiting. But on this day, two women do exchange words. One whispers to the other—“Can you describe this?” The other whispers back, “I can.” Then “something like a smile” crosses the first woman’s face.

The woman who asked the question did not know the identity of the woman who answered, yet by pure chance she found the witness who would save the reality of that moment from oblivion. The poet Anna Akhmatova was in the queue at Kresty to see her son, Lev Gumilev, then under arrest. She was 49 years old, an impoverished widow, debarred from publishing, living in one room in a communal flat carved out of the decayed splendor of the Sheremetiev Palace.

Akhmatova placed her memory of the scene—at the beginning of Requiem, the poetic cycle she wrote over the course of 20 years to commemorate the victims—millions of them—swept off the face of the earth or into the gulag by Stalin’s regime:

I have woven you this wide shroud out of humble words
I overheard you use. Everywhere, forever and always,
I will never forget one single thing.

Requiem was the monument she erected on behalf of every woman who kept vigil outside the prison walls of Russia in the 1930s and on behalf of those confined inside, awaiting interrogation, torture, banishment, or a bullet in the back of the head. She declared that if there ever was a monument raised in her memory, it should be placed there, at the gates of Kresty prison, where she had stood and waited with all the others.

We do not know whether the other woman in the queue survived the siege of Leningrad or whether she ever saw the man she was waiting to help. We know nothing of her fate, only her smile, but thanks to the poem, circulated in manuscript since the 1940s and finally published in the 1960s, we know that she hungered for her experience to be rescued from forgetting. Thanks to her smile and to the genius of the woman who saw it, a poem was written that puts everyone who reads it under an obligation never to forget:

Now I will never manage to untangle
Who is an animal and who a human being
Nor how long I’ll wait till the death sentence
Is carried out.

One of Requiem’s earliest readers in the West was Isaiah Berlin. He had read the work Akhmatova had written as a young woman in Tsarskoe Selo before and after the First World War, before she was banned. When he was in Leningrad in the autumn of 1945, on a visit as a British official, and discovered that she was still alive, he went to see her in the bare room in the Sheremetiev Palace. He was the first visitor from the West that she had seen in 20 years. She read to him in a matter-of-fact voice from a manuscript copy of Requiem:

The quiet Don is flowing quietly
And the yellow moon enters my house.
He enters wearing his hat askew and
Meets a shadow, the yellow moon.
This woman is not well,
This woman is all alone.
Husband in the grave, son jailed,
Please offer a prayer for me.

She read to Berlin, in the gathering darkness, breaking off at one point to exclaim quietly, “No, I cannot. It is no good, you come from a society of human beings, whereas here we are divided into human beings and… ” She fell into a long silence. Later while they were sitting together, in near darkness, her son, Lev Gumilev, recently released from prison, came in and the three of them ate a dish of cold potatoes together. She spoke, Berlin later remembered, “without the slightest trace of self-pity, like a princess in exile, proud, unhappy, unapproachable in a calm, even voice, at times in words of moving eloquence.” With war finally ended, with her son home and many of the poems in the Requiem cycle completed, she knew she had given voice to the torment of her people. It was a calling that she had not chosen, one that made her feel as desolate as the mad women of czarist times who had gathered below the Kremlin tower to wail in vain for their husbands’ release. But it was a calling she was prepared to assume. As she said proudly, she had never chosen exile or escape, had never looked away from horror, and had fulfilled her duty as a witness.

Thanks to her smile and to the genius of the woman who saw it, a poem was written that puts everyone who reads it under an obligation never to forget.

Auschwitz, summer 1944. On a hot Sunday afternoon, two young men in their twenties, one from northern Italy, the other from Strasbourg in Alsace, are walking through the camp to the kitchens to pick up a tureen of soup and carry it back to their barracks. They have both been in the camp for about six months and know its routines. They do not trust each other because you cannot trust anybody here, but Jean has picked Primo for the soup detail. It is the one moment they can stretch out, a brief hour of grace in an infernal routine of exhausting and degrading labor in a place where the smoke from the crematoria colors the sky.

The camp is a babble of languages, with Hungarian and Yiddish being the most prominent, but these two are conversing in French and German. When Jean, the Frenchman, says he would like to learn Italian, Primo, to his own surprise, begins reciting a few fragments from canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno that he had memorized in high school. The canto tells the story of the Greek hero Ulysses who reaches the Gates of Hercules and exhorts his exhausted crew to go farther, to sail out beyond the gates into the wide-open sea. As the verses return to the Italian’s memory, fragment by fragment, Jean becomes engaged in how to translate them best: mare aperto, should it be “open sea”? A Blockführer passes by on a bicycle. They freeze and remove their caps. Once he passes, they resume. When Ulysses “sets out” into the open sea, they argue about whether Dante’s misi mi should be rendered as je me mis in French. Then, with a growing sense that they are sharing a text that contains a promise of freedom, Primo remembers the key lines—the exhortation delivered by Ulysses to convince his crew to set out beyond the Gates of Hercules, beyond the known world—

Consider well the seed that gave you birth
You were not born to live your lives as brutes,
But to be followers of virtue and knowledge

When these lines rise from the darkness of his memory, Primo feels as if he were hearing them for the first time, like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. Jean begs him to repeat them and tell the rest, since they are approaching the kitchen. Primo struggles to remember the concluding lines. He closes his eyes, he bites his finger—it is no use. The cooks are shouting “soup and cabbage” in German and Hungarian, and behind them the men from the other barracks are clamoring to take their turn.

In Primo Levi’s account of this scene, he does not tell us whether he managed to remember the ending. What matters is that the words reminded the two prisoners that they were not born to be brutes, and that there was another world, beyond the wire, where one day they might live as men.

This is undoubtedly why he felt such a surge of exaltation, but we also need to remember how Dante’s tale actually ended. Ulysses and his crew did sail beyond the Gates of Hercules into the wide-open sea. Their mad journey continued into the darkness. They lost sight of the stars and the moon, then a storm struck and just as they saw an island looming up above them their ship foundered, turned over, and they all drowned. The last line of Dante’s canto di Ulisse reads:

Until the sea again closed over us.

Hungary, October 1944. Farmworkers pause in their work in the fields to watch a column of men passing by on the road, a Hungarian labor service brigade, mostly composed of Jews, being marched back from a copper mine in Serbia across the Hungarian countryside. Their work uniforms are ragged; they are a brown and gray river of bodies, some stumbling and falling, others struggling to pick their fellows up and carry them along. Uniformed guards, mostly Hungarians, under the control of the German SS, patrol up and down, and the watching workers see men falling in the ditch, hear shots ring out, until the column disappears over the horizon.

As he stumbles along, one of the prisoners puts words together, assembles phrases, and commits them to memory. They have been on the march for days. In the distance, they can hear the thunder of the approaching Russian divisions. The war will surely be over soon, and they will make it home to their families. At night, lying on the bare ground of a brickyard, among the ragged sleeping men, he takes out a small notebook and writes down seven lines in a meticulously neat hand, conjuring into life the workers in the fields who had watched them pass. With laconic irony, he titles the poem “Picture Postcard”:

At nine kilometers, the pall of burning
Hayrick, homestead, farm.
At the field’s edge, the peasants, silent, smoking
Pipes against the fear of harm.
Here: a lake ruffled only by the step
Of a tiny shepherdess is what the ruffled sheep
Drink in their lowliness.

He procured the notebook by bartering his last cigarettes with Serbian villagers who came to the wire of the Heidenau camp. On the march home, he keeps writing in the hope that he will see his wife, Fanni, again. Of her, he had written, “you whose calm is as the weight and sureness of a psalm.” As he stumbles along, he dreams of her, of verandas, of plum jam, of the stillness of late summer in sun-dappled gardens.

What matters is that the words reminded the two prisoners that they were not born to be brutes.

He has survived months of hard labor in the copper mine, and when the guards started them on the march, he might have thought the journey would take him home, but as the days pass he begins to understand the truth. On the night of October 7-8, 1944, at a brickyard in Serbia, near the Hungarian border, the SS guards order the prisoners to lie down and empty their pockets of valuables. They machine-gun half their captives. A Budapest cabaret violinist topples to his knees and as the prisoner tries to help him the guards shoot the violinist in the neck. The prisoner falls beside him and lies still, not moving. He hears the guard speaking German just above his head. The SS and their Hungarian associates then force the survivors to their feet to resume the march. They are not going home, they now realize, but to labor camps in Germany. By October 24th, they are halfway across Hungary, and he has time, at night, to write another “Picture Postcard”:

The oxen drool saliva mixed with blood
Each one of us is urinating blood.
The squad stands about in knots, stinking, mad.
Death, hideous, is blowing overhead.

By now, they are marching northeast toward the border of the German Reich. The guards make them pitch camp on the tarmac of an abandoned airfield, and while the remnant of men lies sleeping, the prisoner takes up a piece of cardboard he picked up on the road—on the back, an advertisement for cod liver oil—and he writes another “Picture Postcard,” this time describing his encounter with death days before:

I fell beside him and his corpse turned over
Tight already as a snapping string
Shot in the neck. “And that’s how you will end too.”
I whispered to myself, “Lie still, no moving.
Now patience flowers in death.” Then I could hear
Der springt noch auf, above, and very near.
Blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear.

He copies the seven lines into his notebook and dates it October 31, 1944. It is the last entry. One of the survivors of the column, who returned from Germany, later said that he last saw the prisoner, sitting alone on the tarmac of the airfield, staring down at his dilapidated boots.

On November 8th, the Hungarian guards filled two carts full of prisoners no longer able to walk, among them the poet, and took them to local hospitals at a town near the German-Hungarian border. The hospitals turned the dying men away. Then the four Hungarian guards trundled the carts out to the woods outside of town, shot the prisoners in the backs of their heads, and tipped their bodies into a shallow grave.

In August 1946, the poet’s wife, Fanni, was informed that bodies had been exhumed and some of her husband’s personal effects had been found near the town where he had last been seen alive. These effects had been handed over to a local butcher, the leader of the town’s Jewish community. When she went to the butcher shop, he gave her a brown paper parcel. When she unwrapped it, she found a wallet with his photograph and hers, his insurance card, a picture of his mother as a young woman, and the notebook. On the inside page was a message the poet had addressed in five languages—Hungarian, English, French, German, and Serbo-Croatian—informing anyone who found it that it contained the work of a Hungarian poet. When Fanni turned the pages, she found the “Postcards,” written out in his steady, unvarying hand.

Fanni never recovered her husband’s body or gave him a proper burial, but she did live long enough to see Miklós Radnóti recognized as one of the greatest poets of Hungary and Europe. There was indeed an answer to the last line of one of his poems: “But tell me, did the work survive?” His poetry is taught in Hungarian schools to this day. His act of witness also ensured that the suffering of his comrades in the labor service gang would not be forgotten. Like Akhmatova, like Levi, his act of witness was also a judgment that their countries still are reluctant to accept. Radnóti’s work was incorporated into the national canon, but the uncomfortable fact remains that the guards who murdered him were Hungarian.

In the early 2000s, when Fanni was well into her eighties, her husband’s biographer asked her whether the pain of losing him had diminished over time. She shook her head. Did she know, the biographer went on, the poem by Emily Dickinson?

They say that “time assuages,”—
Time never did assuage;
An actual suffering strengthens,
As sinews do, with age.
Time is a test of trouble,
But not a remedy.
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no malady.

Fanni nodded again. Yes, she did know the poem.

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Excerpted from ON CONSOLATION: Finding Solace in Dark Times by Michael Ignatieff. Published by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2021 by Michael Ignatieff. All rights reserved.

On the last day of October 1895, a letter was sent to Stephen Crane by the corresponding editor of The Youth’s Companion inviting him to submit work to the magazine: “In common with the rest of mankind we have been reading The Red Badge of Courage and other war stories by you… and feel a strong desire to have some of your tales.” Advertising itself as “an illustrated Family Paper,” the Companion was a national institution with an immense readership that began its life in 1827 and remained on the American scene for more than 100 years. Never more popular than in the 1890s, it published work by every important writer from Mark Twain to Booker T. Washington, and, as the corresponding editor pointed out in his letter to Crane, “the substantial recognition which the Companion gives to authors is not surpassed in any American periodical.” On top of that, it paid well.

Crane was hard at work on The Third Violet just then, but he wrote back on November fifth to say that he “would be very glad to write for the Companion” and promised to send them something “in the future.” The future arrived in March, when he mailed off the manuscript of “An Episode of War” to the offices in Boston, mentioning in the last line of his cover letter that “this lieutenant is an actual person”—possibly someone he had heard about from his uncle Wilbur Peck, who had served as an army doctor during the war.

The shortest of Crane’s Civil War stories from 1895–96, “An Episode” is also the strongest, the boldest, and the most moving—a thoroughly modern work that takes on the issue of war trauma with pinpoint clarity and perceptiveness. The condition has been a part of human life ever since the first war was fought between battling clans thousands of years ago, and even though it has gone by several different names in America over the course of our history—soldier’s heart during the Civil War, shell shock during World War I, war neurosis during World War II, and post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) during the Vietnam War and on through subsequent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere—its symptoms have never varied, and the affliction is the same one in all wars, repeated again and again in an eternal pattern of inner brokenness and wordless suffering.

The story begins in mid-action as the lieutenant (never named) is conscientiously dividing up and distributing coffee rations to each squad in the regiment. “Lips pursed,” “frowning and serious,” he is using his sword to separate the mass of coffee beans spread across his rubber blanket into squares that are “astoundingly equal in size,” and just as he is about to finish this “great triumph in mathematics,” with various corporals still thronging around him to claim their allotted shares, the lieutenant cries out in pain, looks at the man next to him “as if he suspected it was a case of personal assault,” and an instant after that, when the others notice blood on the lieutenant’s sleeve, they cry out as well. No, the lieutenant has not been punched by a fellow soldier; he has been struck by an enemy bullet.

Crane has managed to tell all this in a mere six sentences, and now, with dozens of narrative options before him, he hunkers down over the next two paragraphs and minutely examines the immediate responses of both the lieutenant and the men to this abrupt, wholly random event, “this catastrophe which had happened when catastrophes were not expected.” No one says a thing. The lieutenant, clearly beginning to go into shock, looks out over the breastwork and stares at the green woods in front of him, which are now dotted with “many little puffs of white smoke.” After a moment, the still-silent men look there as well and contemplate “the distant forest as if their minds were fixed upon the mystery of the bullet’s journey.” The silence is crucial, and Crane prolongs it for an almost unbearable length of time, stretching it out because he is writing about a world in which soldiers are supposed to be shot in battle, not when they are distributing coffee beans to other soldiers, and the mystery of that silent, invisible bullet is powerful enough to stun the witnesses into a state of speechless awe. As for the man who was hit, he has entered a zone in which words are utterly beyond him.

Then comes the intricate business of what to do with the sword. The lieutenant’s right arm is immobilized, and therefore he has transferred it to his left hand, grasping it not by the hilt but somewhere along the middle of the blade, “awkwardly,” and all at once that familiar object, which is the very emblem of his soldierhood, has become strange to him. This is one of the purest examples of Crane’s ability to explore emotions through inanimate things, and by focusing his attention on the sword, he leads us through the lieutenant’s gradual dissociation from the reality he belonged to just minutes earlier, his growing detachment from what is now and will forever after be his former self as he withdraws into the isolating grip of what was then called soldier’s heart.

The process continues when the lieutenant tries to put the sword back in its sheath, an all but impossible task when the sword is in your left hand and the scabbard is on your left side, especially when you are holding the sword in the middle of the blade, and most especially when the sword has become strange and meaningless to you, and as the wounded man engages in a “desperate struggle with the sword and the wobbling scabbard he breathed like a wrestler.”

But at this instant the men, the spectators, awoke from their stone-like poses and crowded forward sympathetically. The orderly-sergeant took the sword and tenderly placed it in the scabbard. At the time, he leaned nervously backward, and did not allow even his finger to brush the body of the lieutenant. A wound gives strange dignity to him who bears it. Well men shy from this new and terrible majesty. It is as if the wounded man’s hand is upon the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all existence, the meaning of ants, potentates, wars, cities, sunshine, snow, a feather dropped from a bird’s wing, and the power of it sheds radiance upon a bloody form, and makes the other men understand sometimes that they are little…

There were others who proffered assistance. One timidly presented his shoulder and asked the lieutenant if he cared to lean upon it, but the latter waved them off mournfully. He wore the look of one who knows he is the victim of a terrible disease and understands his helplessness. He again stared over the breastwork at the forest, and then turning went slowly rearward. He held his right wrist tenderly in his left hand, as if the wounded arm was made of very brittle glass.

And the men in silence stared at the wood, then at the departing lieutenant—then at the wood, then at the lieutenant.

With these piercing formulations and precisely chosen narrative details, Crane delineates the lieutenant’s expulsion from the regiment that has been under his command. The alienating force of the wound has driven him into himself and out of the group, severing his ties with his comrades, and from now on he is a man alone, still in the war but no longer a combatant, invalidated out of the army even as he remains in uniform, and for the next two pages he wanders around in a kind of stupor as he searches for the field hospital, looking at the world as if he were a stranger from another universe, curious but indifferent, cut off from the meanings of things that until now have meant everything to him. When he sees a general mounted on a black horse, for example, and then watches an aide gallop up to him “furiously” and present him with a piece of paper, it was, “for a wonder, precisely like an historical painting.”

The shortest of Crane’s Civil War stories from 1895–96, “An Episode” is also the strongest, the boldest, and the most moving.

Later on, when he sees the swirling, thunderous charge of a battery off to his right, with shouting men on horseback and “the roar of wheels” and “the slant of the glistening guns,” he simply watches—emotionless, walled off, elsewhere. Some stragglers tell him how to find the field hospital, and a few minutes later he is approached by an officer who begins to scold him for not taking proper care of his arm. The officer then “appropriated the lieutenant and the lieutenant’s wound,” cutting the sleeve and bandaging the exposed tissue and mangled flesh with a handkerchief, rattling on in a tone that “allowed one to think he was in the habit of being wounded every day. The lieutenant hung his head, feeling, in this presence, that he did not know how to be correctly wounded.”

At last he makes it to the low white tents surrounding an old schoolhouse that serves as the makeshift hospital, a muddy, clamorous place where two ambulance drivers have interlocked wheels and are shouting at each other, while inside the ambulances, “both crammed with the wounded, there came an occasional groan,” and outside “an interminable crowd of bandaged men” shuffles past as another dispute breaks out on the schoolhouse steps and the lieutenant looks at a man sitting with his back against a tree smoking a corncob pipe—his “face as grey as a new army blanket,” a silent, wounded soldier easing himself into the arms of death. No more than that—a single, haunted image—and then Crane pushes on to the end of the story, with its enormous, startling leap between the last two paragraphs:

A busy surgeon was passing near the lieutenant. “Good morning,” he said with a friendly smile. Then he caught sight of the lieutenant’s arm and his face at once changed. “Well, let’s have a look at it.” He seemed possessed suddenly of a great contempt for the lieutenant. This wound evidently placed the latter on a very low social plane. The doctor cried out impatiently. What mutton-head had tied it up that way anyhow. The lieutenant answered: “Oh, a man.”

When the wound was disclosed the doctor fingered it disdainfully. “Humph,” he said. “You come along with me and I’ll ’tend to you.” His voice contained the same scorn as if he were saying: “You will have to go to jail.”

The lieutenant had been very meek but now his face flushed, and he looked into the doctor’s eyes. “I guess I won’t have it amputated,” he said. “Nonsense, man! nonsense! nonsense!” cried the doctor. “Come along, now. I won’t amputate it. Come along. Don’t be a baby.”

“Let go of me,” said the lieutenant, holding back wrathfully. His glance fixed upon the door of the old school-house, as sinister to him as the portals of death.

And this is the story of how the lieutenant lost his arm. When he reached home his sisters, his mother, his wife, sobbed for a long time at the sight of the flat sleeve. “Oh, well,” he said, standing shamefaced amid these tears, “I don’t suppose it matters as much as all that.”

So ends this astonishing piece of work, which to my mind is one of Crane’s most brilliant little stories, a four-page 60-yard dash run at full tilt from start to finish without a single misstep or stumble along the way, so perfect in its execution that it justifiably ranks as one of the finest war stories in American literature. The jump between the last two paragraphs lands with the force of an explosion, and there we find the one-armed lieutenant among his weeping relatives, a hollowed-out man devastated by the trauma of war who has become so diminished in his own eyes that he can’t even bring himself to regret the loss of his arm. To use Crane’s term, he has discovered that he is “little,” and why should the universe care about the subtraction of one little arm from the body of yet one more little man?

The Youth’s Companion read the story and paid Crane for the right to publish it, which effectively turned the magazine into the owner of “An Episode of War” and explains why it was not included as the seventh story in The Little Regiment, but after paying for the rights, the magazine began to have second thoughts and ultimately decided not to use it. The publication represented the American public, after all, and the editors felt that patriotic Americans would not look kindly upon such a dark representation of the realities of war. Sometime later, in an effort to recoup the money they had forked out for the story they had killed, they sold the British rights to a magazine called The Gentlewoman (!), where it was published in December 1899, six months before Crane’s death, which means that “An Episode” was never circulated among American readers in Crane’s lifetime.

Years passed, and in 1916 The Youth’s Companion dug into its dead-matter file, pulled out the story it had bought from the now long-dead Crane back in 1896, and published it in America for the first time. That was in the middle of the Great War, of course, and with articles from the trenches and hospitals about a new phenomenon known as shell shock everywhere in the world press, perhaps the current editors felt that Crane’s old story had at last become timely—and acceptable to the readers of their magazine. Lest we have forgotten, however, another year would go by before America entered the war, meaning that the story was published when American troops had not yet begun to suffer from the disease that had been ravaging their French and British allies since 1914. By the time the war ended, in November 1918, more than 30,000 of them had.

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Excerpted from BURNING BOY: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster. Published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2021 by Paul Auster. All rights reserved.

As a reporter, I’ve documented war and conflict for more than three decades. The things I carry with me are important. While traveling light and often working in closed countries or besieged areas, the most important things in my backpack, aside from a medical kit, is a book that can nourish and inspire me. Many of the classics of war reportage I chose also parallel with my own life and professional experiences.

Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War
(Grove Press)

Over the Christmas of 1992, at night in my freezing unheated room on Sniper’s Alley, I burrowed under my sleeping bag in three layers of clothes with a flashlight, a candle, and Martha Gellhorn. I was frightened, hungry, cold, and disoriented—besieged Sarajevo was my first real war—and I took some comfort knowing another woman had gone long before me, also struggling to convey the political complexities of a multi-faceted war along with the gut-wrenching sadness of the destruction of a society.

My literary masters had always been the Russians—Turgenev, Chekhov—but Gellhorn’s book, which starts with the Spanish Civil War and winds its way into World War II and beyond, was my solace and my guide, my introduction to the genre of literary reportage. The Face of War taught me, in some ways, that reporting war wasn’t about news angles, but in attention to details—what the aftermath of a bombing smelled like and felt like, how people cut down trees in the park to stay warm or made bread out of rice from humanitarian aid packages. In later life, I met Gellhorn several times. I didn’t agree with her views—she was fiercely anti-Palestinian, based on a few weeks in 1960 traveling through UN refugee camps. For a woman whose early work was full of empathy, her unfailing support of Israel at any cost was entirely partisan and biased. Still, I will never forget reading The Face of War for the first time, marking it lightly with a pencil, and coming back over and over to re-read it during the dark and frightening Bosnian nights for inspiration.

Artyom Borovik, The Hidden War: a Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan
(Grove Press)

I was in Grozny during the second Chechen war when it fell to Russian forces and remember the terror of constant aerial bombardment, the freezing cold, the blood sticking to my boots, the screams of soldiers as their limbs were amputated. Chechnya was the most dangerous and probably frightening war I ever reported, and I struggled to contain my own fear. The Hidden War was always with me. The late Russian journalist Borovik was a beautiful, poetic writer who grasped the ultimate sadness of war—and how the dead come back and haunt you long after you leave the battlefield.

Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War
(Anchor Books)

In 1995, 20 years after the fall of Saigon, I arrived in a bleak Hanoi housing project to meet this gifted writer. He had been among the child soldiers during the Vietnam War on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and it marked him forever. By the war’s end, most of his fellow soldiers were dead. I was haunted by his lyricism, his stirring passion, his quiet and desperate sadness.

Elliot Paul, The Last Time I Saw Paris
(Crombie Jardine)

After many years in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East, I moved to Paris in 2004 to marry and have a baby boy. I struggled to adapt to “normal” life and tried to write about the long-term effect of war. I was intrigued by the occupation of Paris—my own family, like many French families, had both resistance fighters and those who kept their heads down to stay alive during the Nazi occupation. Elliot Paul, an American reporter, lived in Paris on the Rue de la Huchette between the two wars and recorded the everyday life of everyday people—the iceman, the sex workers, the butcher, the baker. He stayed until shortly before they were either sent away, one by one (many were Jews). He returned, postwar, to see this ghost of a neighborhood. It’s a forgotten jewel of a book, a wonderful reminder of how war causes things to fade and disappear—never to return to what they once were.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
(Penguin Group)

Between the two world wars, Rebecca West took a journey to Yugoslavia. Like me, she found herself under the magical Balkan spell. Her portrayal of the country before it cracked into a million pieces is often hard going, but it’s well worth the time and energy to read it. Having spent most of the 1990s in the Balkans, to me, there is no finer interpretation of the people and the region.

__________________________________

The Vanishing by Janine di Giovanni is available via PublicAffairs.

In mid-​March 2020, cell phones across the United States lit up with alarming news. Citing a source in the US Department of Homeland Security, a series of apocalyptic texts warned that the Trump administration was deploying armed US soldiers onto the streets to enforce a lockdown in response to COVID-​19. “They will announce this as soon as they have troops in place to help prevent looters and rioters,” said one text. The anonymous sender noted that his friend “got the call last night and was told to pack and be prepared for the call today with his dispatch orders.” It urged recipients to spread the word. Similar messages warned of an imminent federal quarantine. “From a friend of a friend who works for Cleveland clinic,” began another text, again citing unnamed sources. “Please be advised, within 48 to 72 Hours the president will evoke what is called the Stafford act. . . . ​Stock up on whatever you guys need to make sure you have a two week supply of everything.” It then implored people to forward the text to family and friends.

Back in Washington, the White House reacted quickly. “Text message rumors of a national #quarantine are FAKE,” the National Security Council said in a tweet on March 15, just before midnight. “There is no national lockdown.” But it did little to stem the panic of some recipients, who frantically called their friends and family. As the US government explained, the texts were part of a disinformation campaign intended to sow disorder and confusion during the early stages of the COVID-​19 crisis.

But who sent them? US intelligence agencies ultimately concluded that Chinese government operatives had forwarded texts to Americans on their cell phones and posted false information on social media platforms. Several US intelligence analysts I spoke to did not believe that Chinese agents had created the lockdown texts, but rather amplified existing texts. The messages were tailored to alarm people and drive recipients to share and spread the misinformation on their Twitter and Facebook feeds. China was weaponizing information by sending texts to cell phones on US soil.

For decades, Russia had conducted disinformation campaigns in the United States. The Soviets were famous for their propaganda. So were the Chinese—​though largely outside the United States. Beginning in the 1940s, for example, China orchestrated a relentless propaganda and intelligence campaign against Taiwan. But China had never been this aggressive with operations targeting Americans in the US homeland. US officials were alarmed at how quickly China ramped up pro-​Beijing and anti-​Washington propaganda on social media platforms. “The Chinese have always had the capability to collect information, conduct espionage, and conduct a range of other activities against the United States,” a former US intelligence agency leader told me. “But the Chinese have gone a step farther in conducting disinformation in the United States. And it is decidedly unneighborly.”

Even after American officials had discovered the source of the misinformation, Chinese government officials continued to pile on. Zhao Lijian, a Chinese spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote on Twitter in March that the US military might have spread COVID-​19 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. “It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan,” he wrote. “Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!” The claim that the US Army had infected individuals in Wuhan was ridiculous and completely unsubstantiated. Undeterred, however, the Chinese government amplified the claim on the official Twitter accounts of Chinese embassies and consulates.

The state-​run China Global Television Network Arabic channel produced an episode of China View that aired on March 17. Speaking in Arabic, the presenter falsely asserted that “some new facts” indicated that the pandemic might have originated from American participants in a military sports competition in October 2019 in Wuhan. The presenter further speculated that the virus might have originated out of US defense laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and raised “the possibility of the virus being transmitted to China from abroad during the period of the Military Olympic Games in Wuhan, which was attended by 109 countries, including the United States.”

Russian and Iranian government outlets soon joined the fray, aggressively promoting conspiracy theories that COVID-​19 was a US-​manufactured biological weapon targeting their countries. A news outlet funded by the Russian Ministry of Defense published an article titled “Coronavirus: American Biological Warfare against Russia and China.” It argued that Washington had unleashed COVID-​19 against Russia and China to weaken their economies—​an odd claim, since COVID-​19 devastated the US economy as well. An article from RT, the state-​run Russian news network, suggested that “the U.S. could be the prime culprit behind Covid-​2019 outbreak that hit China and then Iran.” The head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said: “It is possible that this virus is a product of a biological attack by America which initially spread to China and then to Iran and the rest of the world.”

None of these claims were true, of course. But Chinese, Russian, and Iranian activity during the COVID-​19 pandemic highlighted some of the major foreign policy instruments that those countries used to compete with the United States. Cyber campaigns, covert action, support to state and nonstate proxies, information and disinformation, espionage, and economic coercion—​these are the tools of irregular warfare.

*

While conventional warfare—​clashes between large military forces—​defined twentieth-​century power, irregular warfare will increasingly define international politics in the coming decades. Rising powers see an urgent need to globally compete for power and influence, and they are aggressively waging irregular warfare. Though the United States led the world after the Cold War as the only remaining superpower, supported by strong allies and a network of trading partners, the country is woefully unprepared for this type of competition today.

US government agencies and departments are focusing too much on planning for conventional and nuclear war with China, Russia, and other adversaries. Some policy makers are fixated on building a bigger navy with more than 350 ships, spending over $1 trillion on nuclear modernization, expanding the number of active duty and reserve soldiers to more than 1,040,000, and—​perhaps most important—​fighting conventional and nuclear wars against Russia in the Baltic states and China in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. And they are giving too little attention to irregular warfare. Yet China, Russia, and Iran are daily—​even hourly—​targeting the United States at home and abroad, using irregular means. Their main tools are not fighter jets, battle tanks, or infantry soldiers, but hackers, spies, special operations forces, and private military companies with clandestine links to state security agencies. They are waging a war online and in the shadows—​not primarily on conventional battlefields.

The United States does not need to choose between conventional and irregular competition. Both are important. Russia and China are developing conventional and nuclear military capabilities that pose a threat to the United States and its partners. The challenge is to find an equilibrium. As former secretary of defense Robert Gates said to me: “You have to be prepared for the full range of contingencies. One of the reasons that the Cold War, in many respects, was fought using nonmilitary instruments was because of the power of our conventional and nuclear forces to deter the Soviets.” But while the United States fought effective irregular campaigns during the global competition with the Soviet Union, today it has ceded that battlefield to others. The results are disturbing.

US adversaries have exploited polarization in American politics; taken advantage of a withdrawal of US forces from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia; and targeted US universities, companies, and government agencies. These trends worsened under President Donald Trump. His hyperpartisan politics, isolationist tendencies, and disregard for allies made it easier for China, Russia, and Iran to exploit the United States’ vulnerabilities and weaknesses at home and abroad.

After Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the November 2020 presidential election and his incitement of a mob that stormed the US Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, Chinese government officials and pundits excoriated the United States for lecturing the world about democracy and human rights. Favorable views of the United States around the world plummeted, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. In some countries, the United States’ unpopularity in the age of Trump was nearly on par with Kim Jong-​un’s North Korea, a regime run by a despot who butchered and starved his own population.

“We are not primed to compete against the Russians, the Chinese, and the Iranians. We are failing at it,” former acting CIA director Mike Morell said to me. “I am fearful that when historians look back at this period, they will see it as the beginning of China overtaking the United States as a global power.” Charles Cleveland, former head of US Army Special Operations Command, bluntly warned: “The United States is facing death by a thousand cuts. We are not prepared for competition the way the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians see it. For these countries, competition is largely irregular—​not conventional.”

The Chinese are engaging in economic and technological competition, the Russians are conducting aggressive covert action, and the Iranians are leveraging partner forces and other assets in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and other countries. All have aggressive cyber and espionage programs, and all view the United States as their main competitor. All three are also more active than most Americans recognize. “Competition is a daily occurrence,” former CIA director Michael Hayden said to me. “It is happening all the time.” Irregular warfare is generally cheaper for these countries than building conventional and nuclear capabilities. Since they are authoritarian regimes with state-​run economies, China, Russia, and Iran can also direct resources to irregular activities more quickly than the United States can and have few—​or no—​constraints in waging blatant disinformation campaigns and pilfering military and commercial secrets.

“The Chinese are not interested in a shooting war,” said Admiral Bill McRaven, the former head of US Special Operations Command (SOCOM). “They are stealing our technology, they are trying to outpace us in artificial intelligence and other areas. While we can never discount the possibility of war with China, these issues concern me much more than conventional conflict.” In addition, US deputy secretary of defense Kathleen Hicks argued: “Today’s competition of interests is often playing out in a place beyond diplomacy and short of conventional war, which some experts refer to as the gray zone. Too often, rivals are gaining an advantage at the expense of US interests.” Joseph Votel, former head of both SOCOM and US Central Command (CENTCOM), came to a similar conclusion. “We are way too focused on conventional war and deterrence,” he told me. “I saw this when I was SOCOM and CENTCOM commander. Conventional war dominated our approach.”

There is still time to change course. But the United States needs to significantly alter how it thinks about—​and engages in—​competition before it is too late.

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Excerpted from Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran and the Rise of Irregular Warfare. Copyright (c) 2021 by Seth G. Jones. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

It would take Tolstoy some time to sound the alarm that humanitarianism could entrench war. On the way to doing so, he had one of his most famous characters embrace the inverse proposition: brutality can make it rare.

“One thing I would do if I had the power,” Prince Andrei, the debonair and reflective leading man of War and Peace, declares, “I would not take prisoners.” It comes to the hero as an epiphany: if in battle an enemy soldier were captured, or if he laid down his arms and surrendered, it should not save him from death. No one today thinks it is permissible to kill enemies in war summarily when they are captured or surrender. In fact, to do so is today a gross war crime. How could Andrei take a position that would have made even the worst counselors of inhumanity in recent American wars—George W. Bush’s lawyers, who exempted the country precisely from rules about how to treat captives—blanch?

At the Battle of Austerlitz years earlier, Prince Andrei had been wounded and given medical attention as a prisoner of war by no less an authority than Napoleon himself. Yet the night before the greatest battle of the age, at Borodino, Prince Andrei argued that making war humane not only denatured it but also, even worse, risked the postponement of peace. Tolstoy had sat down in 1863 to begin what became his most famous novel (it appeared in 1869), so Prince Andrei’s speech might well have been a direct response to the Geneva Convention. Tolstoy has Prince Andrei refer quite specifically to the fledgling and original attempt by states to make their clashes with one another more humane: “They talk to us of the rules of war,” Prince Andrei says, “of mercy to the unfortunate.” And adds: “It’s all rubbish.”

Andrei’s position was a direct attack on Dunant’s dream. The prince’s attack was rooted not in any immediate appeal to the ethics of peace Tolstoy would later embrace but instead in the peculiar belief that intensifying war could advance peace indirectly. And to understand this belief, and Tolstoy’s eventual reasons for giving it up, it is critical to detour into another agenda for modernizing war: to make it more intense.

The most celebrated theorist of war of the age and all time, the Prussian nobleman Carl von Clausewitz, clarified that the point of engagement is annihilation, and he asserted “the dominance of the destructive principle,” which he feared earlier theorists of war had downplayed. In his four decades in the Prussian Army, the “god of war” had lived through a trio of Napoleonic battles, including Borodino—where, on the bloodiest day of the century, a European army forced Napoleon’s epic advance to a draw at the gates of Moscow in 1812. It was a site that, fifty years later, Tolstoy himself would visit in a hunting wagon halfway through his work, consulting peasants and planning his own narrative, including Prince Andrei’s mortal wounding there.

In his masterpiece, On War (1832), Clausewitz had warned against the “kind-hearted” fiction that a nation could wage a war “without too much bloodshed.” Not only was it useless, but morally reforming war could exacerbate its evil. “Mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst.” Treating the carnage in war as a sin for which to atone or—worse—a blemish on the most beautiful activity in life was something like a moral error. “It would be futile—even wrong—to try to shut one’s eyes to what war really is from sheer distress at its brutality,” Clausewitz explained. Concerns about how gory and gruesome the commitments to intensity could become were petty. “The fact that slaughter is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more seriously,” he allowed, “but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity.” As he observed, “Sooner or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms.”

Dunant founded the international law of war. But it fell to a disciple of Clausewitz’s to offer a brutal answer to the humane aspirations of the Swiss and their descendants—to offer the first national code for fighting. Born in Prussia, too, in 1798 or 1800, Franz Lieber was a young enlistee who saw action near Waterloo, before fleeing to the United States in the repressive years leading up to the abortive 1848 revolution. Francis in America (and Frank to his friends), Lieber refused to pity victims of war. Lieber’s code went in a different direction, legalizing shock and awe, with humanity a fringe benefit rather than a true goal.

Opinionated to his core, Lieber said pacifists were the ones who really deserved compassion. “How much are those to be pitied,” he explained in a widely used ethics textbook that he published in 1839, “whose hearts remained cold” at “the nobleness of human nature” on display when a “citizen [is] bleeding and dying for his beloved country.” Lieber wrote to the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wife, Fanny, saying the truth was that “blood” was the “vital juice” of civilization. (As for those lily-livered pacifists in his time who cited Jesus’s command to turn the other cheek, Lieber was apoplectic: “Christ taught principles,” he acknowledged, but they were “not absolute mathematical formulas [and] if the various passages of the Bible were to be taken literally, no book would contain greater contradictions.”)

When he was given the chance as a Columbia University law professor and government consultant to write rules for the Union Army in 1862, Lieber made them most consistent with the Clausewitzian agenda of intensifying war. Erected as one of its founding fathers later, Lieber was not really part of the tradition of making war humane. He condoned horrendous acts such as punishing civilians and denying quarter—which meant that, when enemies surrendered in hopes of avoiding death, you could kill them anyway. Instead, Lieber was an excellent example—like Clausewitz—of how those actually committed to intense war sometimes pretended to be friends of peace. For Lieber, anything necessary in war, more or less, ought to be legal; if there was such a thing as excess violence and suffering, it was because it was necessary to achieve victory, which hastened peace.

Clausewitz already got into the act. “Battle exists for its own sake alone,” he had insisted. But it also had an extra advantage. It “led directly to peace.” Lieber told a similar story as his master. “If destruction of the enemy is my object, it is not only my right, but my duty, to resort to the most destructive means.” But thankfully, he added, “the more actively this rule is followed out, the better for humanity.” Intensity bred pacification, albeit as a fringe benefit of an already great thing.

Just before he gives his speech, Prince Andrei is passed on horseback by none other than Clausewitz himself. Tolstoy probably never read him. He gave the Prussian theoretician a cameo in War and Peace all the same, to doubt the value of “theory” in the face of the chaos and confusion that defined the clash of military forces. Famously, in War and Peace Tolstoy wanted to smash the Clausewitzian mythology of Napoleon and with it the whole idea that war was amenable to intentional control. As for theorizing about battle at windy altitudes, Tolstoy found it ridiculous, and Clausewitz trots through his scene to imply as much. Yet Tolstoy also has Clausewitz, in addition to delivering a disastrous plan for the next day’s battle, defend brutality, too: “The only aim is to weaken the enemy,” Clausewitz remarks from his saddle (in German in the Russian novel), “so one cannot, of course, take into account the losses of private persons.”

In his dream of not taking prisoners, Tolstoy’s character ironically sounded a Clausewitzian note. What Prince Andrei was suggesting in his speech was that intensification would lead to more humanity and less suffering over time—for all its brutality in the short run— precisely because it would lead to more peace. Not taking prisoners “by itself would change the whole war and make it less cruel,” Andrei says. If Clausewitz was right that intensity led indirectly to pacification, intensification also turned out to be more humane than humanization! On its own, paradoxically, humanization could foment more war, and less humane outcomes. Furthermore, Andrei insisted, making war more humane could lead war to be an easier matter to start: a less fateful and momentous choice, because the stakes were lower. “If there was none of this magnanimity in war,” he continued in his impassioned homily, “we should go to war only when it was worthwhile going to certain death.”

When audiences shrank from the argument that intense wars were good in themselves, advocates of intensification offered blind guesses about the future. It wasn’t just that bloody wars would become less routine. They also suggested that shock and awe would end more quickly once it started. As Lieber forecast, “intense wars are of short duration.”

Yet advocates of making war humane offered an exactly parallel guess on behalf of their own cause. Already in 1864, Gustave Moynier called the Geneva Convention the path down “a slope where there is no stopping; the end of the road cannot be less than the condemnation of war in absolute terms.” The laws of war would become “secret agents of pacification,” Moynier foresaw in one of his rare moments of visionary enthusiasm. “The humanization of war could end only in its abolition,” he promised his funders. “The [Geneva] Convention has furnished an argument in favor of the brotherhood of men. Recognizing that after all they all belong to the same family, men have concluded that they ought to begin by showing some regard for another’s suffering, up to a certain point . . . pending the time when a still stronger conviction of their common humanity shall lead them to understand that the very idea of their killing one another is monstrous.” In short, it was not intensification that would indirectly abet pacification, but humanization.

In fact, the argument that Tolstoy the novelist puts in Prince Andrei’s mouth depends for its success on complete speculation. Could it really work to make war more brutal in the short run so that it became less common and more humane in the long run? Was there evidence for that proposition in the history of Tolstoy’s own time, let alone the brutal and long wars of the twentieth century he did not live to see? Equally hypothetical and unproven, however, was the occasional suggestion of advocates of humanization like Moynier that they were the ones bringing about peace indirectly.

After a conversion experience, Tolstoy gave up Prince Andrei’s shortsighted view. But Aylmer Maude, his biographer and friend, was absolutely right that the speech anticipated Tolstoy’s mature attack on “humanity” in warfare on pacifist grounds, “like the lightning of a coming storm.” For Andrei’s main commitment is not to prediction but to truth and the risks of suppressing it. Prettification of evil is quite simply prevarication, and it could lead people to compromise with it. “Get rid of falsehood,” Andrei counsels, “and let war be war,” “the most horrible thing in life.” Soon Tolstoy devoted most of his energy to the different proposition that making war humane could court the risk of endless war, and above all cover up its horrors. It is the way he did so that applies to our own situation, as we endure the forever if occasionally more humane war of our time.

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Excerpted from Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn. Published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Copyright © 2021 by Samuel Moyn. All rights reserved.

A young man—not so young as some—is going to war. He is small, aquiline, Jewish, gay, cultivated, and preposterously rich. He speaks the high-toned German of fin-de-siècle Vienna, and has decent enough English to argue with Bertrand Russell, who expects him to take the next big step in philosophy. He is the youngest son of a family ruled with ferocious love by a patriarch, recently dead, who insisted his children live by das harte Muss—the hard must of duty.

Though his late father was one of the wealthiest steelmen in Europe, he has volunteered as a private soldier in an artillery regiment. In his backpack he has a sheaf of notes for a book on philosophy—specifically, the logical form of propositions. When the book is published after the war few will read it, perhaps none will grasp it as its author would wish, but it will make him a metonym for genius, the intellectual counterpart of Caspar David Friedrich’s high peak wanderers. For now he is a citizen of an empire and a soldier in an army that, by the end of the war, will have fallen apart, and after the war he will wear his blue field jacket until it falls apart.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in German in 1921, is the most formidably opaque work of modern philosophy, but it is more than this. The first English translation, published in 1922, the year of The Waste Land and Ulysses, might easily have been mistaken for a Modernist war poem—in its structure a satire on the bureaucracies and ranks of the war machine, and in its language a meditation on the inexpressible things its author had witnessed as a soldier.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. Even some of the densest passages—“Does ‘~~p’ negate ~p, or does it affirm p—or both?”—could stand for the sheer din of the war, the polyglot hubbub of an Austro-Hungarian barracks or a set of coordinates barked over a barrage.

Marjorie Perloff—the critic who pioneered an aesthetically attentive reading of the Tractatus—argues that “this note of irresolution, this recognition of a mystery that cannot be solved” should lead us to bracket the book with the foundational texts of Modernism. And Ray Monk, Wittgenstein’s biographer, has pointed out that Wittgenstein’s reflections on “ethics, aesthetics, the soul and the meaning of life” are entirely absent from the notes he took to war. The Tractatus as it appeared in 1921 was a confluence of three streams: Wittgenstein’s deeply conflicted sense of duty; his work on logic with Russell; and his time as an artillery observer at the Eastern Front. As he wrote to his nephew years later, “[the war] saved me; I don’t know what I’d have done without it.”

Wittgenstein grew up in a world of duty. He and his contemporaries struggled to work out exactly what was expected of them, as Austrians, as sons and as men, and how on earth they could possibly live up to these diffuse but exacting obligations. Karl, Wittgenstein’s father, took duty to mean obedience, and sought to shape his sons in his own formidable image. Young Ludwig seems to have escaped the full force of his father’s resolve, but it left its mark. His family regarded him as an obliging boy, rather dim, with a certain aptitude for mechanics.

After school Wittgenstein studied aeronautical engineering in England, flying kites on the moors above Manchester, and happened to read Principles of Mathematics—Russell’s attempt, ultimately flawed, to reconstruct mathematics on a foundation of logic. Family connections led to conversations with the German mathematician Gottlob Frege, who suggested a term of study with Russell. From their first encounter in Cambridge in October 1911 the older man and the younger infuriated, impressed, disappointed and astonished one another. Russell, anxious that his own powers were waning, sought an heir. Wittgenstein, consumed with self-doubt, wanted to know if philosophy could be his vocation.

In Cambridge Wittgenstein worked, and harangued his supposed supervisor, and took tea with the undergraduate mathematician David Hume Pinsent, his closest English friend and (perhaps) the first love of his adult life. Within two years he had grown tired of the airlessness of academic philosophy. Seclusion would give him space to write and think, and in autumn 1913 he moved to a cottage beside a fjord in western Norway. He intended to stay until his work was finished, but a summer visit to his family caught him in Vienna in the late summer of 1914.

Why did Wittgenstein volunteer? His chronic hernias could have secured a medical exemption, or a little string-pulling might have obtained a comfortable sinecure in Vienna. Patriotism, in part—though he was always undeceived about the Central Powers’ chance of victory—but most of all his ingrained sense of duty. For so many of his generation August 1914 promised to satisfy their “quest for authenticity and self-fulfilment” (in Perloff’s phrase). Going to war was a kind of experiment, a chance to find out, empirically, what he would become when he faced death. Within two months Private LJJ Wittgenstein was patrolling the Vistula aboard a captured Russian gunboat.

One could write two almost distinct histories of Wittgenstein’s war: the outward story of postings and promotions, battles and retreats; and the war within him, his incessant labor for decency and integrity. His first months of service brought out a monkish aspect, consumed with horror at the cowardice and complacency he found inside himself, and disgusted at the peasant soldiers who were now his equals. After reading The Gospel in Brief, Tolstoy’s recasting of Christ as a visionary teacher, he experienced something like a Christian conversion, one that fed in him a sense of what lay beyond words and the flesh. I am spirit and therefore I am free: what happens to me in the world of events is of little moment compared with the purity of my soul.

If duty is the discipline of living selflessly in the face of mortality, the Tolstoyan pilgrim must always seek closer encounters with death. Dissatisfied with comparatively safe rear-echelon duties, Wittgenstein petitioned for a front-line posting, and in spring 1916 he was sent to the Eastern front with an artillery regiment. Here he volunteered for the most dangerous assignment, as a forward artillery observer, stationed far out in front of his own lines. Within a few weeks of his arrival the Russian army launched the most concentrated offensive of the Eastern war.

Wittgenstein served long days and nights in his dugout; he received medals for his precise reports under vicious bombardment; and, as Monk has observed, his philosophy and his attitude to life were transformed. His recurrent Sorge—anxiety or fear—was replaced with a sense of utter safety. I am spirit and therefore I am free. The austere logician was drawn to reflect on silence, on death, on forms of experience that cannot adequately be put into words. We can see ethical, aesthetic, even religious truths, but we cannot say them, and if we try we will talk nonsense.

As the Russian advance became an Austrian rout he faced another kind of exhausting confrontation, with the limits of his own flesh. Night after night of retreat left him so tired that he almost fell from his horse, and impressed on him that he was, like his comrades and his enemies, only another kind of brute.

Recuperating in Olmütz over the winter of 1916 Wittgenstein befriended the architect-turned-soldier Paul Engelmann. A discussion of Ludwig Uhland’s poem “Count Eberhard’s Hawthorn” provoked Wittgenstein to an insight that seems to anticipate Beckett: “And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be—unutterably—contained in what has been uttered!” Wittgenstein’s outward war had some way to run: he would serve on the Italian front, spend a year in a prisoner-of-war camp, and be driven almost to suicide by the news of Pinsent’s death in an air accident. His inner war, though, was over. For the moment, at least, he had worked out how to say everything that could meaningfully be said.

The young man who came back from the war looked, like so many survivors, much older than his years. He divided his inheritance among his (incredulous and suspicious) siblings, and for a decade or more seemed to want to do anything but philosophy. He taught, brilliantly and imperiously, in an Austrian village school; he tended the monastery garden at Klosterneuburg; he designed a crisp rectilinear townhouse in Vienna for his sister. As in war, so in peace, he sought to immerse himself in duty and, in doing so, to see the vanishing of the problem of life. He returned to philosophy only when he became convinced that silence was not the end of the matter.

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Richard Barnett’s latest collection of poetry, Wherever We Are When We Come To The End, is available from Valley Press.

“When someone asks me for my name, I say I am someone who has lost my home many times over.”–Field notes, India-Bangladesh border

He had nothing left of his home except an old map of his city. The maps no longer looked like the map he had memorized as a student. It looked like a tilted triangle, but he called it the broken half of a whole. His school and the local factory that produced jams and juices had been turned into a camp. His city was remade, and his country doesn’t exist anymore. He was a refugee twice over, an exile once, and an orphan always.

After he arrived in this country, he renamed himself Ishmael, after the son who was supposed to be sacrificed for God, but lived. He did everything he could to begin anew. But he could never entirely cleanse himself of the violence he had encountered. The war never left him, that immense pain of having lost his family and his home clung to him. Time no longer made any sense to him, it no longer anchored him. For him, it no longer moved. It simply stagnated.

When I met Ishmael, he had a set of notebooks with collected news clippings from the war years. He called the collection his museum of forgotten facts. Flipping through his many notebooks, you would learn about an internment camp that men went to voluntarily because they thought they would be safer there than on the street filled with men in uniform.

You’d come across the cellist who performed at funerals for free during the height of the siege, when every street corner had a sniper positioned to attack civilians. And you’d encounter the journalist, who now cleans toilets in Sarajevo, who kept 100 notebooks with names of the dead, and of the men he saw killed during those 20 days of carnage. Then there was the woman who had been starved at the internment camp. She lived, but lost the sense of taste, except the taste of cold prison floors. Freedom, once stolen, crippled, and starved, never managed to recover.

Ishmael had a simple question. Why did his home not exist anymore? Why was it unmade and erased? Looking for answers, he said he would become a modern-day Ibn Battuta, traveling the contours of apartheid and occupation; the fractured lines that refused to become nations, and the ugly walls and fences that divided people. His lines did not match the lines that proclaim nations sovereign.

But he never left the city of his last refuge. He stayed, he waited, and he rotted a little every day.

*

What does it feel like to be the last one? I can no longer live knowing I am the last one. Not when they claim we never existed.

They found this note next to Ishmael’s limp body. He had lived as a refugee, an exile, and an orphan for over 20 years. He had no executor; no living will. He left nothing behind, for no one. Everything he owned fit into a cardboard box that his Armenian landlord had donated to a thrift store—including his museum of forgotten facts, his notebooks full of news clippings, names, dates, and maps of his city and a country that no longer exists.

When Primo Levi, the chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor, died in 1987, Elie Wiesel made an infamous observation: “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz 40 years later.”

Like Levi, Ishmael died at his home that was destroyed, nearly 20 years later. I don’t know why he chose to end his life; perhaps living had become a terrible price to pay. “Exacting,” was the word he had used when we first spoke almost a decade ago.

For all his eloquence about war, violence, and pain, Ishmael appeared childlike. He was a boy when he had lost everyone and everything to the war. He had never reconciled with the violence, and the loss of his country never made sense to him.

“Where do I belong?” Ishmael asked once. This question of belonging, that he left life without answering, haunts me the most. Did he belong to his land? To this time? Or did he belong to silence and forgetting?

When I worked for the War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia, I spent months reading the witness summaries of victims and survivors. Many of the witnesses who came before the tribunal were those who had survived heinous crimes, had witnessed them, or had family who were victims of ethnic cleansing and genocide. They talked of starvation, of the destruction of their homes and community; separation and disappearances of family members; physical torture; sexual violence and rape; abuse, torture, and killing of others; perilous flight or escape and forced exile. What they often spoke of as justice was really a deep longing to make sense of their loss.

When people came to testify at the tribunal, they brought tokens with them; anything that would convey their loss, make them human and not another witness number or statement. Above all, they wanted their personal purgatories to be recorded, remembered, and acknowledged. Some brought photographs of the family they had lost and gave them to the lawyers and investigators. Justice, for many of them, was about not being forgotten.

Ishmael was no different. In his museum of forgotten facts, he obsessively collected maps and old photographs of his home—proof that his memories were true, that his city was not imagined but had existed, even if they were clippings from newspapers. But the maps did not speak his language; they speak the language of the state, the bureaucrats, politicians, and the armies. Maps are objects of power, and they do not belong to the people. Maps are keepers of a state’s knowledge: the distances, the miles, the nautical miles, and where things begin and end.

They are not keepers of people’s memories. So Ishmael tinkered with the maps and vandalized them, hoping one day he would make them speak his language.

“To redraw the world and its contours is my magnum opus,” he had said many times over. He would break up the borders—those lines that bring order—into unruly curls and curves. He drew the places he had lost, and sometimes he drew them as places they would have become if they were allowed to exist.

His maps committed treason; his memories were disloyal to the state.

The struggle over geography, the struggle to define the frontiers of our home, has existed throughout history. But when maps became the arsenal of imperialism and colonial conquest, people, in turn, became surveys and statistics. For the maps of this world to make sense, many fictions have been put in place, and we have been taught to treat these fictions as fact.

We imagine nations out of nonexistent lines—sometimes amputating communities or whole cultures to make way for a country—and reinforce the lines with violence lest they cease to exist altogether. Borders make unequal people.

I have met many Ishmaels now. In Kigali, Khartoum, Kashmir, London, The Hague, Berlin, Arusha, Cairo, Kabul, Karbala, Mardin, and Ni’lin. These many Ishmaels are people who live as exiles, as refugees, and as prisoners. Some were forced to flee, and some were born in exile. Others have returned home to their city emptied by bombs. There are those who live in cities that have now been remade into camps, dotted with bunkers, checkpoints, and guns. Their every move surveilled. Their humanity first questioned and then denied.

Like Ishmael, they are all part of the histories of occupation violence and multiple exiles, and they are also all remarkable bards, storytellers trying to make sense of their world’s injustices, inequities, and violence. Landlocked between disquiet and desperation, they are not in search of great truths about the world, just about themselves. Caught between history, time, and territory, they are the people who get trapped beneath the collapsing lines that willed nations into existence. And they are the unacknowledged casualties when those arbitrary borders shift, even a little.

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Excerpted from Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India. Used with the permission of the publisher, Melville House. Copyright © 2021 by Suchitra Vijayan.