Status Updates From Undertones of War

“Relieve! / But who with what command can now relieve / The dead men from that chaos, or my soul?”

from the Somme and now to Passchendaele; “a peculiar difficulty would exist for the artist to select the sights, faces, words, incidents which characterized the time… the succeeding day was dismal, noisy and horrid with sudden death.”

I take it back, there’s nothing between the lines, it’s all extant horror

one of the things that’s most interesting and most challenging in historical memoir is trying to read between the lines of what’s said and what’s not said, and why, and to figure out what inferences the author wanted us to draw from those blank spaces — a kind of science fiction reader’s work, a situating in the world and the context of another place

idk what’s going on with my brain that I’m still reading so slowly, but this is very very well-told and very very harrowing