Chapter 1

“We must love one another or die”

-W.H Auden

“All wars are unnecessary. Human unity has only ever been accomplished through peace.”

Marcus listened, trying his best not to grind his teeth into a fine paste.

“My opponent today is under the impression that all of us in this room who hold this belief do so due to naivety. But if love of my fellow human being makes me naïve, then I'm guilty as charged. May the brave warriors who venerate humanity's barbaric past like Mr Graham here string me up before you."

A series of chuckles came from the student body. Marcus was about ready to split his pen in half. He’d promised himself he’d take notes – that he’d focus on fact-based debate.

“Don’t let yourself get baited!” Maria had told him when he groggily rose from bed at 2am this morning to look over his speech for the seventeenth time. “If Steven starts off with ad-hominem attacks, don’t rise to it. You hear me? You can be such a bloody hothead and that’s not the look you want.”

Now here he sat in the lecture hall, his hands practically shaking with rage, which of course the student photographers at the debate event would take a snapshot of and label as fear in tomorrow’s campus paper.

Above the door to the lecture theatre hung an ‘Exit’ sign in blazing neon letters that proved to be distractingly tantalizing. And below this sign, hanging limply from the door, was plastered the name of the event he’d, in his infinite wisdom, decided it would be a good idea to speak at:

‘The Morality of Warfare’

Recent tensions in the contested nation-state of Kosava had prompted heated discussion on the subject on campus, and the Head of the Centre for Military History had called on him to make a case that their faculty was still a legitimate one. Marcus had risen to the challenge like a rooster with the rising sun, and only afterwards had he realized exactly who is opponent would be.

“Of course, I don’t mean to assert that my opponent today is nothing but a mouthpiece of ideologically-charged talking points. I think his track record speaks for itself.”

Steven Barenz. Chairman of the Unification Office – as dystopian as that title sounded. He was a self-proclaimed crusader for justice, who had taken it upon himself to see that Marcus’s faculty – indeed his entire subject itself – was deemed too dangerous to be taught to the bright young minds of this generation.

The Unification Office...Marcus was someone who strongly believed in the separation of church and state, but he generally turned a blind eye to new faiths popping up on Campus. After all, people were free to follow whatever moral code made sense to them. This one though - the church of Unification...they seemed to breed evangelical robots more than they molded people.

Unity was what they wanted, even if it meant erasing the past. And men like Marcus - military historians - were on the wrong side of the new history they were writing.

“Yes,” Steven was saying, hands flying around like a preacher. “Marcus Graham has been a spokesperson for a department in this college that is quickly becoming a thing of the Dark Ages. Like the wars he so desperately clings to - hugging the image of its old, gung-ho heroes to his breast like a glorified John Wayne production - he is a relic. A fossil. But he cannot be fully blamed for his ignorance. Our nation, after all, was built on the very same ignorance he demonstrates today.”

Don't get baited, don't get baited....don't let yourself lose control, Marcus. He had known Barenz to be an opponent who could whip up a crowd with controversial statements. He was a showman. And, Marcus hated to admit, he was good at it.

And here Marcus sat beneath him, crumpled notepad in hand, black-rimmed spectacles framing his freckled nose. Somehow, the disparity between them pissed him off more.

Suddenly Steven came to the crux of a real argument, and Marcus entered the room once more:

“War has accomplished nothing but suffering,” he was saying, hands gripping the podium like it might fall away from him. “And it brings out the worst in human nature. Witness the Rape of Nanjing by the Imperial Japanese Kwomangting, the atrocities committed in the name of God during the Crusades, and the complete failure that was Vietnam. These incidents speak for themselves. They were invasions, pure and simple, of a foreign power against a sovereign nation. The idea of ‘Might makes Right’ was fully on display – and legitimized all atrocities the invading forces committed. The children of Nanjing, Ho Chi Ming, and Akris were slaughtered like cattle, all for the sake of some ideological victory over a perceived ‘enemy’.

Furthermore, the concept of ‘good wars’ and ‘bad wars’ that Marcus has written so much about has no basis in reality. Even in the Second World War, the allied forces cannot claim the moral high ground in the wake of the firebombing of Dresden, an event which killed approximately 25000 innocent German lives. I wonder what the Founding Fathers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would say if they heard Mr Graham speak today on the ‘necessity’ of the atomic bomb that vaporized their people? Could he look them in the eye – the melting bodies of the Japanese who died in nuclear fire – and tell them they were just the necessary casualties needed to end the war?”

The crowd had grown silent. Almost reverent, and a chorus of rapturous applause echoed from every seat as Steven bowed lightly and finished up his opening statement.

Marcus, meanwhile, was just surprised that Steven had actually read something he’d written, even if he’d done nothing more than give it a cursory glance.

The Speaker then invited Marcus to the podium. He rose steadily, his notes crumpled in his hand.

“Just breathe”, he muttered under his breath. “Face your fear, and do it anyway.”

Some boos and jeers greeted him instantly, and Steven’s proud, smug face beamed at him from the front of the crowd.

As the spotlight above hit his eyes, Marcus was suddenly transported back to Maria fixing his tie before he stepped out of his apartment this morning.

“He’ll try everything to distract you,” she had said. “They crowd will be on his side. You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” he’d told her with a smile. “But I have to do this.”

“Why? It’s not like you have anything to prove. You’re gonna be a published author soon. You don’t have to answer a callout from some pompous twat like that.”

“Don’t use labels like that,” he said with a chuckle. “They do nothing but keep us all divided.”

“What?” she giggled back. "Twat' or 'pompous'? I call them like I see them, hun. That's what you signed up for when you started dating me."

He looked at her pale face framed by locks of amber hair and inset with gleaming chestnut eyes. When he’d started seeing her, most people remarked how she looked more like a ghost than a woman.

How ironic, then, that she was the only woman he’d ever met who saw him for who he was – who had been able to see that within this bookish military history nerd there beat a heart filled to the brim with passion for everything he threw himself into.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said again as she pressed a wet kiss onto his pallid lips.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“I know,” he whispered. “But in order to be able to think, we all need opposition every now and then. I don’t want to live in a world where we all believe the same things.”

“The way things are going…” she replied tentatively. “With people like him around…”

He took her hands in his and smiled through his tiredness. “Maria, that’s exactly why we have to fight!”

It was her face that he saw through the bright spotlights of the lecture hall, and then, as the light dimmed and dipped beneath his eyes, he looked out onto a sea of hatred.

He muttered an apology to Maria. He wasn’t about to take this sitting down.

“My opponent seems to know everything about me,” he began, looking directly into the sea of anger as it slowly began to swell with his every word. “But I believe it is more useful to judge a man by the content of his speech rather than by blanket statements about what he represents.”

The seething had already begun. He didn’t care.

“Mr Barenz would have me answer for the sins of a generation that came before me. He would parade me before you like a witch on trial. And yet, I wonder if he has truly spared a thought to the piles of corpses he wants to stand on. Would Mr Barenz care to listen to the 6 million Jews massacred in the Holocaust, and tell them that Dresden was the worst calamity of that barbarous conflict? Would he care to listen to the thousands of Americans butchered in Japanese internment camps, or perhaps the 7.5 million Chinese civilians who, as he puts it himself, fell to the Japanese Imperial Army from as early as 1936 and who, for the record, make up the highest percentage of civilian casualties experienced across the entire wartime period? Could he look at that sea of dead and tell them the atomic bomb was a mistake?”

The crowd was starting to rise up in arms. He went on, unperturbed.

“I am not here to shock you,” Marcus said, trying to check his flaring temper. “I am here to point out that if Mr Barenz’ argument is that atrocity exists, then I agree with him. It happens to be a part of human nature and –“

“WHO ARE YOU TO DECIDE THAT!?”

The question was belted from a young man in the crowd that Marcus could barely even see.

“I don’t decide a thing. None of us do. Human history follows identifiable trajectories,” he explained. “War has been part of every developed culture on the face of this earth. To look at only atrocities committed in warfare and judge all armed disputes based on them is to deny the necessity of fighting a just conflict.”

“JUST?!” someone yelled back at him. “Is there justice in sending thousands of young people to die for politicians who don't care a jot about them?”

By this point, Marcus’ teeth were practically sharpened. But he breathed. He stayed calm.

“I'm not arguing for conscription,” Marcus replied, his grip tightening on the podium’s edges. “I'm arguing that there are such things as righteous causes for which people must take up arms. Would you tell Cochise that, even though the odds were against him, he should have simply given up and submitted to the USA’s genocidal campaigns against his people? Evil is evil – plain and simple.”*

“Who is this kid?” one of the professors suddenly barked up at him.

“But I –“ Marcus stammered, seeing fists begin to flare and tempers rise. “I – I am not here to defend the concept of warfare! I am here to defend the study and analysis of military conflict as a legitimate branch of history.”

“And you’re doing a shitty job of it!”

“History is-often-written by the victors!” Marcus shouted, fumbling with his notes, trying to be heard over the increasing might of the crowd. “But this is only partially correct – in truth, it is written by historians. Historians who have the objectivity to look at the past and learn from the mistakes we, as humans, have made. And I tell you that war is not a blanket evil. We must catalogue and emphasize the horrors of war. But we must also catalogue the simple fact that, sometimes, one person – or one people – must stand up and fight.”

“You Jingoist bastard!” another voice cried.

“No!” Marcus shouted right back, his voice becoming increasingly hoarse. “I do not condone conquest, or the enslavement and domination of others through military force. Force cannot change the minds of a people. But education can-“

He stopped, feeling something heavy and sharp impact the side of his head, and his hand flew to feel the trickle of blood that had started to run down the side of his face.

The object that had been thrown at him – a rock wrapped in notebook paper – fell heavily to the ground.

And with it, all hell broke loose in the hall.

Some students had started charging the stage, barreling over their classmates while they flew a peace sign from a great banner that trailed after them. The campus guards surged forwards, bearing down on the protestors while the doors were opened from the outside and the call went out that the lecture was finished. As the students started to be funneled away by the overburdened security guards, some started crying out bloody murder, while others tried to maze the campus guards before they were shoved away, taking selfies of their brutalized faces and telling their online followers that they had just been assaulted at Mr Graham’s lecture. No mention of Steven Berenz was made.

Marcus watched in stunned horror as the remaining students fighting in the hall clambered over themselves, trying to reach him, while the beleaguered Campus guards did what they could to extract him as soon as possible.

“Come on, son,” one of them told Marcus, grabbing him by his limp arm and dragging him away by force. “Time to go.”

Marcus looked through the haze of red that clouded his vision at the baying, hateful crowd. Like a pack of jackals yipping to see him shredded apart. They hadn’t come here to listen or to learn.

And as he let the security detail lead him outside, he suddenly realized his mistake: he had taken the bait long before the lecture had even started.

…

The incessant ticking of Marcus’ antique clock dominated his meagre student apartment.

Above, his ceiling fan spun with little alternative as he lay on his threadbare couch like a potato stewing in the warm California sun. Maria looked down at him, her lithe fingers stroking his thinning, disheveled hair.

“You know,” she said. “Maybe if you’d at least showered before the show, they’d have listened to you.”

He struggled to form a wry smile, taking her hand in his.

“I’m a fool, Mari.”

She shook her pale face. “No you’re not,” she said. “You’re just someone who actually believes in the things he says. That’s never gonna make you a popular guy on a college campus.”

He sighed, long and deep, as he reached for his phone.

Maria, however, was faster. She snatched it up and threw it away.

“Nope,” she told his incredulous face. “You’re not looking at that. You’re gonna look at me instead.”

She took his face in both her hands and squeezed his cheeks together, rubbing them like he was a little boy being reprimanded for bad behavior.

“Hey!” he chuckled. “I’m a sensitive man, you know.”

She planted a kiss on his forehead. “Don’t I know it. That’s why I’m not having you look at your phone. You’ve lost all your internet privileges today.”

He sighed again as his eyes traced her defined features, losing himself momentarily in the chestnut sea of her eyes. He’d made the mistake of checking his socials in the wake of the debate, seeing – well – exactly what he expected. The Unification brigade had taken to saying he incited violence, and all they needed to prove this claim was some pictures of bruised faces and copies of his student transcript which, of course, someone had managed to procure. Now they were organizing a petition to have him removed from his faculty, labelling him a Stochastic Terrorist.

The worst part? He understood. He got it. He could see why they needed to believe what they did - these students who had never bore witness to horror. The Warlords gathering power on the far side of the world weren't their concern. They thought belligerence could be fought with pacifism.

It wasn't even their fault. The Office had whipped them up into a frenzy before the lecture had even begun. He should have known that. He should have seen how the 'debate' would go.

“Hey,” Maria interrupted his thoughts. “I can see it in your eyes. You’re thinking about those Twitter freaks again. What have I told you about letting them get to your head?”

He closed his eyes. He knew she was right. As a student of Communications and Psychology, she knew much more about how the modern world of propaganda and how it worked than he ever had. He’d been too stuck in the past before he met her. She’d led him into the present.

“Mari,” he said. “What am I going to do?”

She blinked. “About what?”

“They’ll never publish the book now.”

He looked towards the manuscript on his desk – screeds and screeds of painstaking research compiled over at least 6 years of constant study as part of his Doctoral Thesis. An overview of military tactics from the medieval-early-modern-contemporary era, and an assessment of observed patterns. Effectiveness of campaigns, relative strengths of military commanders, technological developments and how these strategies from the past could still have practical application.

It was his life’s work, staring him in the face every morning, begging him to finalize it and send it out into the world.

But now? Now he could barely even look at it. It was as though he – the author – had failed the work. He wasn’t worthy enough to carry it through.

“You always doubt yourself,” Maria said gently, her fingers playing with his tufts of frizzled hair. “But – look – it’s you that’s the most important thing here. You haven’t taken a break in days. Look at you.”

She sat up and forced him to look in a small glass mirror. The reflection that looked back at him barely resembled what he knew to be himself – his dark rimmed glasses were steamed up and cracked at the ends, the sharp jade eyes behind them looked at him with judgement, and his beard was just as matted and unkept as his hair.

“To tell you the truth,” she said. “I’m worried about you, Marc. You’re not looking after yourself. You’re throwing everything away on this. Life’s more than just study, you know. It’s more than just recognition. Who the hell cares if they don’t like the book? You don’t have anything to prove to them.”

He shifted his eyes and looked back at the manuscript, seeing – as only an author could – all the blood, sweat, and tears he’d poured into it over the years.

“I am that book,” he said.

When then he curled up to sleep, he felt Maria’s hand touch his back like she was trying to dress an open wound before he escaped into the world of his dreams.