War stirs the blood. Teeth gritted. Jaw clenched. Heart pounding. Is death around the corner? Yours or someone else’s? The mundanity of everyday life recedes. It’s here, on the edge

of life and death, that one really lives. Everything matters, because the stakes couldn’t be higher.

How did we get here? Thousands of years have passed, and the purposes of war haven’t changed: defending a homeland, a people, a resource—or seizing someone else’s. What sends someone to war also remains the same: money, pride, loyalty, ambition.

The only thing that changes is the implement of slaughter. Once it was a knife in the throat delivered from a few inches away, the blood spurting onto the hands of the killer as they looked into the wide and wild eyes of their victim. These days it is mostly the crump and thud

of artillery, or the whiz-bang of explosives delivered from an aerial drone by a pilot miles away peering at an image on a screen that lends a strange intimacy.

How does it start? The steadiness of everyday life falls apart very quickly—crumbles to dust. Sometimes it isn’t noticed at first, like a small hole in a bucket of water, which drains away slowly.

Sometimes it arrives like a torrent, sweeping everything before it.

It can happen here, you know? One day there’s a game of football, a trip to the supermarket, a coffee on the terrace. The next, the ground shakes, the walls crack, and the human body is alone, soft flesh and fragile bone, against the metal.

Fight, cower, or flee? Whichever we chose, we’ll never be the same again. We ran for our lives, but the air was thick with metal, and our daughter didn’t make it. We buried our heads deeper and deeper and hoped to survive. Maybe some of us did. Or we fought.

How will they be, these warriors, who yesterday were drinking coffee, cheering the players and buying flour? They were kind, these brothers and fathers. They played with their kids. They helped a neighbour. But now, here they are, teeth bared, their tight throats burning with fear or fury, their fingers on triggers pointed at heads and necks.

Some of them are prepared to die, but which ones are prepared to kill? Those are the ones that are really needed. They will get the job done. For good or for bad.

Who will say what is good or bad? Was she passing the coordinates of our positions to the enemy? Her husband and son must have been helping her. They defied us! Their information cost us lives and time. They are combatants too! And soon, a mum, dad and son lay dead

in a shallow pit in a forest where they used to pick mushrooms.

Did you look her in the eyes as you killed her? Of course not. That’s for the irredeemable. I shot her in the back of the head. But now the tide has turned, and you, the great warrior, the grand

master of everyone and everything thanks to the gun that you carry, are disarmed, heaving for breath, throat dry like sand. Where is your power now? What mercy can you hope for, merciless one? Perhaps now, the danger has passed. Can we creep out from the

shattered walls and pick through what remains? Perhaps, perhaps we can breathe again.

What is left? There is our school teacher. He’s in a gutter, a chain around his hands and a rope around his neck. They have gone. We have won. We can relax. No need for body armour or helmets. Let’s just go take a look. There were battles here.

Discarded weapons, clothes and food. Drawings from children back home exhorting them to victory, to bring peace. They don’t know how they killed here. There’s the charred shell of a tank by the side of a field where tractors used to drive. And there, also, the wind blows through

the grass as the sun plays on the—BANG! You fool, you would have said to yourself—you let your guard down, and now you are dead, and it is too late. You are laid out on the back of a truck, and the socks that you pulled on this morning are useless because your feet are cold and dead.

Many are dead.

Many are not. But their blood is stirred. And it cannot be unstirred.