THE ROAD TO POKROVSK
KES 350
Categories: Non-Fiction, Religion & Spirituality, Webinars
A walk past Frozen Bodies; Stark, Visual & True to the War's Core Horror
I was asked to choose a way of telling this story, and to borrow the voice of the writer who best fits it. I chose the tradition of the war witness — the plain, unflinching literary testimony that treats a single ordinary life as the whole measure of a war, and I have written it in the voice of Erich Maria Remarque, the soldier who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front. I chose Remarque because his subject is Steven's subject. He wrote about young men who were promised something — glory, duty, a future — and handed a rifle instead; who watched every friend they had die one by one until they were the last; who came home carrying a war that would not leave the inside of their heads. Remarque never raised his voice. He let the facts fall like snow, quietly, until they buried you. That is the register this story needs, because the truth of it is already unbearable and requires no exaggeration. Where the drafts gave me facts — names, dates, distances, sums of money — I have kept them. Where they gave me only the bare event, I have used the freedom I was given to paint the cold, the drones, the slums, the fear, and the faces, so that a reader who has never left home can stand where Steven stood. Nothing essential has been invented. The dead are real. The betrayals are real. Steven is alive, and this is his account, told the way I believe it deserves to be heard. Everything here belongs to him.