White mars by Brian W. Aldiss & Roger Penrose. Chapter 19, 20

Yet would not that rather bloodless life of reason be better than the world of the bludgeon, the old unregenerate world, continually ravaged by war and its degradations in one region or another? My father, whose altruism I had inherited, had left his home country to serve as a doctor in the eastern Adriatic, among the poor in the coastal town of Splon. There he set up a clinic. In that clinic, he treated all alike, Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant.

My father believed that the West, with its spirit of enquiry, was moving towards an age of reason, however faltering was its progress.

In Splon I passed many years of my boyhood, unaffected by the poverty surrounding us, ranging free in the mountains behind the town. My elder sister, Patricia, was my great friend and ally, a big-hearted girl with an insatiable curiosity about nature. We used to swim through the currents of our stretch of sea to gain a small island called Isplan. Here Pat and I used to pretend to be shipwrecked, as if in prodromoic rehearsal for being stranded on another planet.

Civil war broke out in the country when I was nine years old, in 2024. My father and mother refused to leave with other foreign nationals. They were blind to danger, seeing it as their duty to stay and serve the innocent people of Splon. However, they sent Pat away to safety, to live with an aunt. For a while, I missed her greatly.

Civil war is a cancer. The innocent people of Splon took sides and began to kill and torture each other. Their pretext was that they were being treated unfairly and demanded only social justice, but behind this veneer of reasonable argument, calculated to dull their consciences and win them sympathy abroad, lay a mindless cruelty, a wish to destroy those whose religious beliefs they did not share.

They set about destroying not merely the vulnerable living bodies of their former neighbours, the new enemies, but their enemies’ homes as well, together with anything of historic or aesthetic worth.

The bridge over the River Splo was one of the few examples of local architecture worthy of preservation. Built by the Ottomans five centuries earlier, it had featured on the holiday brochures distributed by the tourist office. People came from all over the world to enjoy the graceful parabola of Splon’s old bridge.

As tanks gathered in the mountains behind the town, as an ancient warship appeared offshore, as mortars and artillery were dug in along the road to town, that famous Splo Bridge was available for target practice. It fell soon, its rubble and dust cascading into the Splo.

The enemy made no attempt to enter the town. Their soldiers loitered smoking and boozing some metres down the road. They laid cowardly siege to Splon, setting about destroying it, not for any strategic purpose but merely because they had hatred and shells to spare.

Anyone trying to escape from Splon was liable to capture. As prisoners, they suffered barbaric torture. Women were raped and mutilated. Children were raped and used as target practice.

Occasionally, one such captive, broken, was allowed to crawl back to Splon to give a report on these barbarities, in order that the fear and tension of the starving inhabitants might be increased. Often such survivors died in my father’s little surgery, beyond his aid.

The great organisations of the Western world stood back and watched dismayed at the slaughter on their TV screens. In truth they were puzzled as to how to quell civil war, where the will to fight and die was so strong and the reason for the struggle so hard to comprehend.

During that year of siege we lived for the most part in cellars. Sanitation was improvised. Food was scarce. I would venture out with my friend Milos under cover of darkness to fish off the harbour wall. More than once hidden snipers fired at us, so that we had to crawl to safety.

Starvation came early to Splon, followed by disease. To bury the dead in the rocky soil, exposed to snipers on all sides, was not easy – a hasty business at best. I spent some days away from the town, lying in long grass, trying to kill a rabbit with a stone from a catapult. Once, when I returned, triumphant, with a dead animal for the pot, it was to find my mother dying of cholera. My sorrow and guilt haunt me still.

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