by Kali Altsoba
LeClerc sees it in his face. He’s surprised at how the former PM’s suffering moves him, taken aback at his sympathy for a man he has opposed for years, and still blames for much of the calamity that’s all around. “There’s nothing quite like war to rob the wisest men of confidence.”
“I don’t feel wise, not as I once did. I confess, it has been hard these past months, watching all fall into ruin, seeing so many of our people perish.”
“Tragedy is always hard, especially in the ending.”
“And yet our people expect this tragedy to reach a happy ending. Ah well, I now leave that to men like you and Georges Briand. My wants are smaller. I want only to know the truth.”
“Smaller? Only the truth? You ask too much! We are fallen under a veil where we must grope for truth each day. It’s mendacity that’s more easily spread and believed in such times.”
“It seems so. How then are we to know true things from false?”
“Our intelligence is improving. We’re moving good people into the right places. We’re learning the enemy’s habits and intentions and learning to fight by fighting, as all armies must.”
“I’m glad to hear it, general. But I’m asking something ... more personal.”
“I know it. You want truths greater than gains-and-losses of ships and worlds, or passing advantage in the last battle and projections of the next campaign.”
“Yes.”
“You want to know the deeper truth of war?”
“Yes.”
“Ahh, well then. I’ll speak more frankly, prime minister. Untrammeled from polite lies. Out of respect for your question, for it’s seldom asked and far less often answered honestly.”
“Thank you, general.”
“Don’t thank me yet. You won’t like this truth.”
“I expect not. But I must hear it.”
“Where to start? Aye, yes. At the beginning. Well then, you need to accept that lies are far more important than truth in war. You can make war without any truth, but not without lies.”
“You mean lies to our own people that hide our plans, to deceive the enemy and conceal our military secrets? Yes of course.”
“Yes, that’s basic and essential. But I mean much bigger lies that hide the true nature and cost of war, to keep our people fighting.”
“You don’t trust them with the truth?”
“What truth? That we must steal childhood from their children as we ask them to do even more terrible things than our enemies do to us? No, I do not trust our people. Or at least, not yet.”
“We shan’t ask for that, to do worse than our terrible enemies have done to us?”
“Not yet, but before the end we will.”
“I can’t bring myself to be so cynical, general.”
“You can afford to stay pure. You’re a civilian. I cannot. I’m a general.
“You do intend to be blunt! Good. So tell me, why not appeal to our people’s great virtue instead? They are a good and decent people. You must believe that?”
“I do. That’s why I do not trust them to do the terrible, indecent things that we will have to do to win. Our people must learn to be hard and cruel before they can be trusted in war.”
“What a ghastly thought!”
“We don’t listen to our better angels even in peace. In war, it’s daemons that have more virtue. Low cunning and hate are locked into human nature, and far more useful in making war.”
“People aren’t mere brutes. We can choose to be decent. We can restrain from the worst lusts and acts. We aren’t wild beasts.”
“Are we not? It’s we who make war. Beasts do not.”
“I’m loathe to believe it, or to accept that you believe it.”
“Accept it or don’t, prime minister. It remains true all the same. But leave that aside.”
“Gladly.” Hoare pauses, then he commits. “You’re a military man, a man of war...”
LeClerc interrupts: “A military man, yes. Not a man of war. I’m not so foul as that.”
“My apologies, general. I meant no insult.”
“None taken. I merely point out that most men and women in my profession despise this war. We’re doing jobs you civilians asked us to undertake in your name and interest and defense. But don’t mistake us for lovers of war. I know of no Pyotrs or Jahandars wearing ACU blue, no man or woman who slavers for war like the gray fanatics in SAC or the degenerates in SHISH.”
“A point well made and accepted. Again, my apologies.”
“Also well made, and accepted. Do you want to ask more?”
“Yes, why did peace prove so fragile and war is so strong it overcomes all we do?”
“Peace was betrayed, sir. Twice betrayed. As for why, diplomacy is your realm, not mine. A place of twisted politics and perversion of words, of games of power and prejudice. My world is simpler, more morally clear. I know who my enemies are and that I must kill them.”
“It’s as simple as that?”
“It is now that war is here. For years I watched the Gorgon head of politicians writhe with words. When all your fine talk ended I found a sword in my hands and you asking me to use it.”
“I can’t deny that, general.”
“You want, prime minister, we all want to believe that all people, or most, are naturally peaceful. We tell ourselves that war is a moral and social aberration, that peace is the true norm. But you should doubt whether war is outside our nature. War may be our vital and true nature.”
“I wouldn’t want to believe that. What a hopeless vision!”
“You have the same faith in Humanity that you have in yourself, prime minister. The second belief is worthy but the first is badly misplaced. You believe in the possibility of moral progress and redemption, so you became a politician. I believe in sin. That’s why I’m a soldier.”
“Are you saying that we’re doomed to always sin, by our shared nature?”
“I was making a rhetorical point, about sinning. I’m not a religious man. But yes, I’m saying that we have a coarse and common nature. We see this in the pattern of all our wars.”
“So we shall have war always?”
“Probably. History does not repeat. But like the tide, it returns to flood again and again. It’s filled with patterns, imprints of our nature in the sand. That’s why history rhymes with sin.”
“What do you mean?”
“War comes easily to us, more easily than peace. It’s the most complex and expensive, physically and morally demanding activity we humans undertake. No art, no music, no soaring Life Temple, no great city, no terraformed colony or research into the cure for a dread disease, no science or engineering project, nothing receives a fraction of the resources and commitment we put into waging war, recovering from the last war, and readying for the next one. War may be our defining natural and social characteristic. We are the social beasts who make war.”
“But we also make peace and laws and build those same cities and civilizations that war destroys. How is that a moment of destruction is so much stronger than creation, than reason?”
“Don’t underestimate the role of reason in war, prime minister. War is at root and all its tangled branches a gross failure of imagination. It’s an awful thing, to be sure. Yet it is not to be dismissed as merely stupid or beyond reason, or mindless and irrational.”
“It seems to me that it is, as it does to many others. How can you say that it’s not? How can you look on fighting and not say that war is stupid, that instead it’s filled with reason?”
“I don’t say that war is reasonable, only that it’s a realm of our reasoning. The core aim for all who make war is to change some political thing, and therefore in a narrow sense war is rational. A statesmen chooses war to be the instrument that best serves his policy. Soldiers obey. Sometimes you leaders choose peace, at other times you choose war. There are no stumbles. All wars are wars of choice, wars of reasoned purpose. Even those waged by unreasonable leaders.”
“This i
s sophistry! What’s in a reason? In a named thing? It can’t reduce to that! The horror of war can’t be only a choice of means? ‘I choose A not C?’ There’s no higher cause or purpose to be served? What kind of man chooses such evil means to advance a mere policy?”
“With respect, prime minister, a politician. Or if you like, a man of politics. Which is to say, all of us. Women too, of course. I see no difference there.”
“You dodge my point.”
“About war’s unreasonableness? Whatever the specific goal, SAC’s genetism or Pyotr’s vanity or Jahandar’s madness, or to defend our homeworlds and ways of life, war’s purpose is to impose one’s will on the other side by threats and cudgels and blows. War is just an instrument.”
“So war is just a schoolyard fight, a boys’ stupid brawl only with better weapons?”
“No, it’s much more, prime minister. War is organized, purposeful, mass violence. It’s not irrational, impulsive or just stupid. However noble or venal or evil one's goals, war waged as a choice to achieve them is reasoned in means, purposeful in intention, and cruelly intelligent in its methods. That’s not a pretty thought. It’s more important. It’s an ugly truth. But yes, war is also what you say. A stupid, hot-blooded school brawl with no monitors in sight to break it up.”
“Are we no better than that general, after three centuries of peace?”
“We are better on most days, prime minister. Yet, look around, on some days we are not. That’s all it takes, one choice, one day to ruin all the thousand days and works that came before.”
“So, even in peace we walk along the edge of a knife?”
“Yes, on a diamond blade. Always but a single slip away from war and death.”
“What of law? I spent my life building laws against the night.”
“As the ancients knew, in war all laws fall silent. Moral and legal reasoning are tools of the decent, of civilized men and women. They’re there at the beginning and at the end of wars, captured in things like the soaring jus ad bellum ideals of the Peace of Orion. But law plays no role in the conduct of war, especially long wars. War is too primal and feral to be caged by law.”
“Is there no ‘Just War’ after all? Is there just war, as that awful man Juan Castro tells our cadets? No morality or rule of law once we’re in the realm of war, in the death ground? Don’t our best jurists say there is? That there’s also the jus in bello, the law of waging rightful war?”
“Very good. You have the concept, even if I dispute the virtues of my old and dear friend from Kars. Juan Castro gave a hard but true education to our officer cadets, before he left to lead our troops in the fight on Glarus. No sir, he’s right. No morality or law survives inside war.”
“None at all?”
“Not after the blood goes hot. Then war becomes the ultimate realm of physical exertion and suffering, governed only by lex talionis. A base law of Nature, the law of tooth and talon.”
“But we have rules! We don’t target civilians or cultural sites and cities. If we abandon all restrictions on the means of destruction how can we make war and yet remain civilized?”
“We can’t. There are such rules, of course, made in peacetime by armchair philosophers who love to debate differences between making war and making perfect war. There’s no perfect war that’s real. Nothing in or about war is clean. War is vicious, sordid and filthy. Our enemies understand that and wage war accordingly. The question facing you and the cabinets and all Calmaris, is whether we also understand and accept that we too must to do these things to win?”
“Even kill the innocent?”
“We have advanced tek, but we haven’t invented the perfect weapon. We can’t just kill our wicked enemies and not also innocents, who populate all worlds and wars and who always die in larger numbers than the wicked.”
“Yes, yes, I agree that ‘collateral damage’ is unavoidable at times and that it must be accepted if we’re to fight at all. Is that the same as accepting that we should have no rules, no laws, no restraint on how we wage war?”
“All civilized peoples will resort to primitive violence to survive. To any means, foul and fouler. Once war begins restraints come off, and before it’s over all rules lie broken. Then we’ll say that we had to do it, we’ll claim that our enemies were so evil they left us no choice at all.”
“Do we have a choice.”
“We always have a choice. And we always make the same one. To take the fight beyond rules, past any restraint. To make guerre mortelle, war to the death of all our enemies.”
“Why?”
“I could say it’s necessary to survive, but it’s more true that it’s in our nature. As for your idea that there should be civilized war, before we’re done civilization itself may cease. We’ll pause it until victory is achieved and rule of law is a luxury we may indulge again. We’ll do what’s necessary, then we’ll pull a skin of law over our bloody nakedness to hide from ourselves what we did.”
“You can’t believe that it’s the purpose of your profession to eclipse civilization!”
“I do not. It’s to preserve law and civilization by deterring those who would end both by starting new wars. But once fighting starts my role changes. The job of my profession is to kill people and break their things. It’s a fool’s seduction to hold to self-restraint, rules of engagement the other side will ignore. The only rules worth following are those that lead to success in battle.”
“Is there no morality left at all? Only do whatever is best to achieve destruction?”
“Some would say there are too many moralities, but all so subjective that no moral claims are universal. That war alone is universal because it’s the determinant of group survival. That we are the beasts who make war and who war thereby turns into beasts.”
“Do you believe that, general?”
“Not for a moment. It’s the old bio-theory of war, at its worst. As if Charles Darwin was a general! No, I believe in a universal morality. Even if we can’t agree on all moral things, we know the core and we always have.”
“Yet you would have us fight without moral restraint?”
“No, I would not, if allowed such a preference. But real war is what it is, and that is the realm where all law stops, where rules hold back only the good and permit evil to thrive. To do good in war you must let go of rules that say ‘do no evil thing.’ War is no more or less than the gory business of killing and destruction to impose our will on our enemies, so that they can’t impose theirs on us. War like Nature is red in tooth and claw and will to live. You must shed any illusions about this if we are to win. You and I and everyone else must do whatever that takes.”
Robert Hoare is shaken. He doesn’t speak for over a minute. LeClerc thinks: ‘Now we come to it.’ He breaks the silence.
“Ask your question, prime minister.”
“Will our people do these awful things? Or will the martial races of Orion triumph?”
“I don’t believe in ‘martial races,’ prime minister. Other than the entire human race, as I have said. Martial cultures are different. The first is nonsense, but the second fill up our history.”
“I stand corrected. Still, will we agree to match Nalchik and Kestino blow for blow, evil for evil in the means with which we make war? Will we climb down into the tar pits together?”
“Yes, prime minister. That’s what you and I must do, and worse. We must overwhelm with greater evil and destruction than they bring to us, throw back their aggression, then follow our retreating enemies to their homeworlds to put a hard boot on each neck, Grün and Dauran.”
“So much as that? No one will win if the war comes to that.”
“Someone will win. We must ensure that it’s not our enemies. Georges is right. It won’t be enough to defeat their armies and fleets and hurl them from our systems. We must overthrow the eastern regimes, force real change on all their homeworlds. And to do that we shall have to occupy them, then stand watchful guard over their defeat and smoldering anger and sh
ame.”
“For how long?”
“Generations to come.”
“I doubt that we can bear to do it.”
“We must. This war will kill billions before it ends. It will ruin worlds. Good men and women everywhere will lament these losses and deplore the means that you and I approve and use today, and far worse means that I assure you we will approve tomorrow. Yet, this evil we must do, for a great war for the Thousand Worlds is necessary to crush the awfulness of Purity and overthrow the twin Tyrants, and so save some remnant of civilization for all the rest of us.”