With All Her Volumes Vast...
“History, with all her volumes vast, hath but one page.”
Over the last few days the news has been full of the drums of war. The U.S. and North Korea, rattling their nuclear sabers, jostle an already unbalanced world.
The news takes me back three years, when on an August morning I awoke after a powerful dream. In it, I was watching a film where the actress Ellen Page was playing an unnamed war widow. The widow had spent 50 years caring for her dead husband's boots. She took the boots to a monument memorializing her husband's regiment. Crying, she laid down next to the monument, clutched the boots as if they were her lost love, and died.
It wasn't a happy dream, but it got me thinking. Right away I knew I wanted it to become my next story. So I wrote "Promises." Boy marries girl in the middle of a war. He goes off to the front of a week later. He is listed as missing in action three months after that. She spends her life coming to terms with her loss. An old woman, she uses her savings to make one final journey. And finally, decades later, a soldier finds the decaying boots, and uses the soles to patch his own before continuing the march toward the next war.
"Der Krieg" by Otto Dix. Photo by the author.
"Promises" a story that has no doubt been told in real life, probably in dozens of societies throughout history. That's why when writing it I was deliberately vague about when and where the story takes place. The setting most closely resembles the World War I German home front Remarque describes in All Quiet on the Western Front. The unnamed nation holds Soviet-style military parades. Yet there is familiar technology and societal norms: televisions, freeways, and even marriage equality.
While touring Dresden last year, I found a perfect image to complement "Promises." At the New Masters' Picture Gallery I viewed Otto Dix's "Der Krieg" (The War). In the painting, soldiers are caught in a cycle of war and death.
"Der Krieg" is one of the most powerful antiwar messages ever created. Finishing the work, Dix must have believed that it was impossible for anyone in his society to engage in another war like the one he had barely survived a a young man.
But that was 1932, and Dix was German.
We should always be vigilant, for it is far too easy for the cycle to start again.