She wept when she saw the images of the museum in Mosul, shown over and over on the news channels: a man wearing a dishdasha, an angle grinder in his hand, hard at work on the great winged colossus. Others smashing a statue with a mallet. She put her hand over her mouth, as if she were about to cry out, or throw up. Yet she knows how violent these men are, looting, raping, killing. She knows her country is falling apart while this army advances, their black flag brandishing the name of Allah, and that they are just one more aspect of the obscurantism that has always existed, that likes neither music, nor women, nor knowledge, nor the freedom of peoples. She knows all that. There are reports of huge columns of refugees fleeing the north, trying to reach Iraqi Kurdistan. It is said that the Yazidis are trapped in the Sinjar mountains, starving, and they are shown no mercy—women, children, old people. Is that not worse, their blood, those mothers searching in vain for a refuge, those faces gaunt with fatigue, still fleeing, always fleeing, endlessly? Is that not worse than a few nicks of the angle grinder against stone? When Mosul fell, she followed the news by the hour, saddened and dismayed, but she didn’t cry. Whereas every gash this man makes to the face of the stone giant with the braided beard makes her sick. The images on the news show the chaos in the museum. Objects overturned, display windows smashed. Artifacts are grabbed and stuffed in pockets. Others are thrown to the floor with a cry of “Allahu Akbar”; smashed for eternity, the sadness of the few seconds that suffice to annihilate vases and statues that had survived for centuries. Those men overturning urns and striking statues: they think they are subjugating time itself. Oh, it took so long for those artifacts to reach us. The men and women who devoted their life to the cause: Paul-Émile Botta, the consul of Mosul who discovered Khorsabad and brought back the great bulls that have pride of place in the Mesopotamian rooms at the Louvre. Gertrude Bell, who took part in the creation of Iraq at the summit in Cairo, where she had Churchill’s ear and where Lawrence of Arabia nodded, concurring with her analyses; she also wanted to leave the country she loved with a museum, and founded what would become the Baghdad Antiquities Museum, later the National Museum of Iraq. Hormuzd Rassam, the little boy from Mosul who was sixteen when Botta came to his town, and who ended up in Brighton, but not before discovering the oldest manuscript of Gilgamesh . . . All those men who dug and thought and searched and failed and searched again. All those anonymous hands, helping with a pickaxe, raising dust and sand, caressing a newly-found object before passing it on to the excavation leader. All those artifacts patiently dusted, weighed, examined: the centuries had looked after them and now they have ended up here, hurled against the wall, “Allahu Akbar”: how can they even say those words, when all they express is the ugliness and intoxication of destruction?

 

The first days after his return from Afghanistan—or the first hours—he is incapable of saying how much time had gone by—the room in the military hospital seemed enormous to Sullivan Sicoh, and he did not even try to encompass it with his gaze. He felt it was beyond his strength. He saw bodies, sensed presences, the medical staff coming and going by his bedside, to change a bandage, a drip, his own silent thick drip or that of other patients in beds nearby, who occasionally made a sound—a moan, a call, a murmur to themselves—a sign that there was still life in them, however faint, however much that life moaned, a life thoroughly shattered. And then gradually the spells of consciousness grew longer, and now he can open his eyes more decisively. They sit him up in bed and he can see all of the room, smaller than he’d pictured it. Broken bodies. Emaciated men with pale complexions, restless or drowsy. Here he is, back from Kalafgan and in this strangely calm ward of suffering (you’d think that all these young men in here—all valiant soldiers only a few weeks ago—would be screaming, protesting, demanding that the vigor and wholeness of their bodies be restored to them), the nurses wander around like nuns in a convent, hardly moving the air, just the faint light sound of their steps to signal their presence. He looks around him at the broken bodies, the faces full of pain, and he decides that this ward, these beds are not a place of rest and reconstruction, but a place he must run from as soon as he can, that these patients around him are not brothers, but shadows from whom he must flee.

 

Hannibal touches his eye with his fingertip. There is no more pus. Has it healed? Has his body triumphed over the gangrene? The wound is no longer oozing. He looks out at the horizon, swaying to the slow pace of his horse. He cannot see anything, never again will he see anything, with that eye. But it doesn’t matter. The swamps of the Arno have taken an eye from him. So be it. This Roman empire, on whose ground he is now walking, this empire he has been fighting since his arrival, has had its opportunity to mark his flesh. It’s only fair. It is total war that lies ahead and perhaps he will lose even more, perhaps one eye is only the beginning. All through the campaigns to come, his body will pay the price. He must accept this possibility. So many of his own people will be wounded. So many will follow him, despite lameness or an atrophied hand. The farther they go, the greater the number of crippled men among them. It is only fair that he should know what it means to be on the same footing as his men. War is raging. He is facing Publius Cornelius Scipio. One of them must give way, and it will be the Roman. He has already begun to falter: during the battle at Ticinus, then at Trebbia. He very nearly died on the battlefield, during their first confrontation. The Romans panicked, were terrified, no longer knew what to do. Custom held that in the art of war a winter truce must be honored, but Hannibal ordered his men to continue advancing, despite the cold. They marched on Rome in November, in December, and sometimes there was snow. The elephants died one after the other but nothing could stop the army’s indomitable advance. During the battle at Trebbia, they covered their bodies in oil to protect against the cold, and it was the Romans who died, numbed, too slow, their teeth chattering when it came time to fight, their bodies shivering when they should have been taking aim. Hannibal would lose an eye, yes, but he was advancing. And the Senate was beginning to quake in its boots. Cornelius Scipio seems not to know how to wage a battle anymore, whereas the arms of the Numidian rebels do not tremble. So, surely Hannibal can sacrifice an eye to the Roman soil. What did they all think? That they could ride to victory and remain immaculate? That from so much fighting they could emerge unharmed, fresh as daisies? Since crossing Gibraltar he has given his life over to war. This means his body, his time, his thoughts. There will be injuries, and cries. There will be scars and terror, and if that is all, then he can consider himself lucky. The Romans have not understood this, and they are slowly realizing that what is about to happen will be neither clean nor respectful. There will be no panache. Everything is dirty and terrifying, just like the corpses of the Romans drowned in the snow-swollen waters of the Trebbia—those men with blue lips, bodies stiff with cold, floating drearily. He has lost an eye, it is true. He will go around half-blind now, but this matters little to him, so long as they keep advancing.

 

“For the moment, they like me,” he thinks, there in his tent, while an aide-de-camp brings a letter informing him that General Buell is stalled and therefore they will confront Johnston’s army on their own. “They like me because I was victorious at Fort Henry and Fort Donaldson, and I’m one of the only senior officers from the Union to have a few victories to my name . . . ” He thinks of McClellan, who is indecisive, McClellan who always waits for months as if he were afraid to move his pawns across the Geological Survey map. Because the men are pawns. There is no other way to look at it. Or then you shouldn’t be a general. There are no farmers, no kindly fathers, no overgrown schoolboys with jolly faces and wide-spaced teeth, there are no husbands, there are only units. Otherwise, how could you decide to send this battalion to the front and not that one? How could you order a group to go on a diversionary mission when you know there is a good chance they won’t make it back? Only Sherman understands this. Because he’s crazy, and he knows that the men don’t count anymore, that you have to accept this way of thinking and that in so doing you forfeit your right to call yourself human. And because he knows all that, he is crazy. And besides, Sherman is brave. Not brave in the ordinary sense of the word, which is merely a variation on obedience. How many men perform heroic acts simply because they have been ordered to, because they don’t have the strength to say no? With Sherman it is something else. He is courageous because he refuses to accept defeat. It consumes him. Defeat makes him want to bite someone, to spur the sides of his horse and charge all alone into the enemy ranks. He disobeys the normal course of events. And not many men have this gift. That is why he was the only one who fought at Bull Run, the only one who truly refused to be in on the spoils. Yes, Sherman can understand. All the others will turn their backs on him when the men begin to fall. “For the time being, they like me,” he thinks, “but that will change.” He curses. The aide-de-camp thinks it’s because of the news he has just brought, but he is mistaken. It is not the fact Buell is delayed that worries him. He is furious because he fell off his horse yesterday and that means that today he has to use crutches to get up out of his camp bed. He is furious because this injury will prevent him from riding into the thick of the battle, when that is where the course of fate will be determined. He knows that things will get ugly, and in a vague sort of way he can sense it will be soon. The only difference between him and his men and the Confederates, is their cause. It’s not nothing. They have to cling to that. The rest is going to be ugly. The men will start killing each other on a grand scale, and they have to resist. The soldiers, whatever side they are on, will be immersed in the fire and the fray, and it is with astonishment that they will discover the sordid face of murder.

 

Sullivan Sicoh looks all around at the bodies that have been there with him for months, and what he sees is war and debacle. In the wounds, the disabilities, the stumps, the lowered gazes, the tears of helplessness. Like everyone else, he focuses hard to perform his reeducation exercises. He has to build up his muscles again, his body having melted away from the long days lying in bed, he has to unravel the tension that at times makes him look like an old man. He has to fill out, force his muscles to regain their elasticity. He tries to focus in order to forget all the rest, including the pain. Inch by inch, day by day, he reconquers some territory of his own life. He wants to become who he once was and, slowly, he is getting there. He can tell he is making progress. The physiotherapists have told him so. He is recovering his vitality. And then one morning the doctor comes to see him and he knows from the smile on his face that today they won’t be doing any exercises, that they’ve finished, he has reclaimed the use of his body. So he lets the doctor come up to him and before he has time to say a single word, Sullivan looks at him and says, “Are we done? Am I good to go out and kill again?”

 

In her office at UNESCO she wept. The images were all the same, and the disgust was always new. Until she remembered how greedy men can be. Islamic State, like others before them, will listen to money. They already know that what they are doing terrifies the world and that it is possible to earn vast sums of money with these artifacts that are lying on the floor. The angle grinder was merely to raise the stakes. Behind it lies the door to a vast traffic in stolen art. So she knows she must go there. And that is also what the head of cultural heritage tells her when she enters her office, pale, holding a folder in her hand that she hasn’t been able to read because all morning all she could do, dumbfounded, was watch the images playing over and over on the television. “If there is anyone who should be there right now, it’s you. Never mind the inauguration at the Baghdad museum. You’ll be more useful in Mosul. There might be a few items you can still save . . . ” Mariam knows she’s right, and that she has to act quickly. So without hesitating she throws a few belongings in a bag and boards a flight for Erbil.

 

“They’re attacking!” Grant sits up in his bunk and looks at his watch. It is six A.M. He hears the first shots. How can they already be so close? He gets up, grimaces when his foot touches the floor—he’d forgotten about his fall—and hurries to put on his tunic. “They’re attacking!” Sherman leaps up, too, and Prentiss and Wallace, all the Union officers who are camping with their men around the little church at Shiloh. How many are they? Where are they? They are all getting up. The enlisted men reach for their rifles. The officers saddle their horses. The artillerymen get busy and already the enemy is upon them. The Confederates arrive in a thick wave. They are running, shouting to give themselves courage, glad of the element of surprise they have created, the panic they can see in the Yankee ranks. They have to form a line of defense as quickly as possible. Not scatter. Not give way to fear. Regroup. And hold fast. At any cost. Hold fast. Grant says it, then repeats it. Otherwise, they will be blown to pieces . . . 

 

“Sack the villages!” From the top of the hill where he has pitched his camp Hannibal looks down at the graceful slopes of Tuscany in the gentle late-afternoon light. Everything here is beautiful: the vineyards on the hillsides, the cypress trees dotting the fields. Everything is opulent and peaceful. His men hesitate, look at him. Are those really his orders? He can see they do not believe him so he repeats it, “Tell your men to destroy everything.” He knows what this means. He knows how rough the Balearic rebels will be when they break down doors and throw themselves upon everything—women, animals, wine—to satisfy a monstrous appetite, to forget the hardship of the Alps and the scorching sun upon the glaciers. He knows it will get ugly, that their robes will be torn in the mud, that houses will be set ablaze and villages razed to the ground. But this is the region of Flaminius, the commander of the Roman legions, and he must be defied, needled, made to lose his composure. Some men go to war on the condition that it will not touch them. They agree to put their own lives in the balance, yes, but not their wives’ or their children’s, or their cellars full of amphorae of oil and local wine, or the beautiful houses they have inherited. Flaminius is one of those men. Hannibal can tell. He will lay waste to the entire region, and the Roman will lose his clear-sightedness and his composure.

 

Everything is a question of composure, and Sherman has no lack of it. He gathers his men and reforms his line of defense. Prentiss, in the center, does likewise. They must stand firm. The Confederates are upon them. The first wave knocks them over like a sword thrust in the belly. The dead men fall, only just roused from sleep, their faces now forever frozen in the morning chill. “Take me to the battlefield!” orders Grant. He wants to get as close as possible. He knows that it is composure that will make the difference, and he has plenty. In this respect he and Sherman are twins. They remain equally calm in the fray, they have the same ability to read troop movements in the crush. He speaks to his men, berates them, encourages them. He wants to know who is overwhelmed and who is resisting, where reinforcements are needed . . . That is how battles are won, by controlling the fear that is constantly trying to make you turn tail and thrusts you toward death just when you thought you were saved.

 

Her plane has just left Vienna. She is headed east. Soon she will fly over Turkey and then northern Iraq. Soon she will pass above Mosul, the gutted museum, the barbarians gleeful of their misdeeds, these layers of History that are her life, there below, in this region that is constantly set ablaze.

 

The waves follow, one after the other. Who can withstand such an onslaught of power? Eight, ten, twelve, more than fifteen attacks are launched against the Yankee line of defense. The Confederates are indefatigable. They charge again and again . . . Bodies mingle, in an embrace of death. The enemy is no longer visible, so dense is the cloud of gunpowder and smoke. Hold fast. Grant keeps saying the words, like a prayer. And that is what Prentiss and his men do, at the forward post, for over seven consecutive hours. They hold fast, to give Grant and the others time to get organized, to give Buell time to arrive and take up his position. Then at last they surrender. Aching, stunned, their faces splattered with the blood of those who fell by their side, enemies or brothers, they surrender, and General Johnston smiles. He has not yet understood that this surrender is not a victory for him; Prentiss may be capitulating but Sherman has had time to take up a new position, as has Wallace. Grant is more determined than ever. The wind has changed. And only Johnston fails to understand that as Prentiss advances, battered by all the blows given and received, looking gaunt and exhausted, his uniform in tatters, it is as a victor. Because from now on the battle will start to go the other way.

 

She flies over the war-torn land between Mosul and Erbil. That is where Alexander beat Darius. That is where Paul-Émile Botta found and excavated Dur-Sharrukin. These lands have never stopped bleeding, for centuries empires have clashed and their people have fled from war. Her own life consists of digging, unearthing, preserving. What is the point, if the world is on fire? Should she not, rather, take up a gun to try and check the killers’ advance? So many questions reeling through her. Of course she shouldn’t. It’s absurd. She knows very well that she is fighting, in her way, but she cannot help but think again of the man with the angle grinder. And what if he were standing there before her, would she be prepared to kill him to protect the great colossus?

 

Not a sound. The thick fog seems to be stifling everything. The birds have fallen silent. The Romans cannot even hear the sound of their own footsteps on the ground. Everything is silence. They advance. Flaminius wants to have done with Hannibal. So that never again will any barbarian be in a position to burn the villages of Tuscany. So that never again will Rome experience the humiliation of trembling before the enemy.

The Carthaginians try not to breathe, not to let their weapons rattle. They wait. It is now that the outcome will be decided. And they know it. Lake Trasimene is not far from here; they have taken up their positions high on the hills above the valley. If the Romans pass below them, in the narrow defile along the river, they will have won. If the sky clears and they become visible, all will be lost. Hannibal waits. He knows that the day’s outcome no longer depends on him. A sound, a horse whinnying, a cloud shifting—anything can change the course of History. And then suddenly one of his men goes up to him and murmurs in a thick voice, “They have entered the defile.” So he stands and orders his men to hurl themselves upon the enemy.

 

“Charge!”

General Johnston himself is participating in the attack, and he plants his spurs in his horse’s sides. He thinks that all they have to do is finish the attack and it will all be over soon. The Yankees have withdrawn to Pittsburg Landing. He sees nothing to prevent him from making the most of his advantage. He thinks it is time to harry the defeated. “Charge!”

 

The Carthaginians scurry down the slope. And initially the Romans do not understand where the shouts are coming from, because the fog distorts sounds, displaces them. Until suddenly they see the men there, already upon them, careening down the hill to their left. The horses are frightened and rear up. The foot soldiers withdraw spontaneously toward the lake to avoid the attack. There is confusion everywhere, and no one can see a thing.

 

A bullet pierces Johnston’s leg, near the top of his boot. The blood flows, sticky, thick. He thinks it is nothing serious, and stays on his horse. He does not know that the blood will continue to fill his boot and that in less than an hour he will be dead, there, at Shiloh, in this land that should have been a site of victory but which will, instead, be his grave.

 

The panic spreads everywhere. No one can control the men. Flaminius knows that if they lose their calm they will be lost. He shouts orders but no one can hear them in the fog. Everything goes to pieces. The Gauls are terrifying, with their braids and long beards. Then a horseman rushes at the consul and kills him with one blow. A little voice falls silent in the mêlée and the vast Roman army, without its leader, scatters in all directions.

 

“Charge!” Now it is Grant who is shouting. And Buell with him. Sherman, Wallace, and all the Yankee officers. It is their turn to advance. War is nothing else: this backwards and forwards, gaining territory or losing it. Standing one’s ground or retreating. And having the strength to get back up, even after seven hours of combat, even after a night on the lookout, to attack the same enemy who tore you to pieces the day before. Beauregard, who has replaced Johnston, sees the Union troops counterattacking. He realizes it is all over. More men will die, but the battle of Shiloh has been lost and there is nothing for it but to retreat.

 

She glides over her gilded lands. Seen from here, everything looks calm. And yet she knows that on the ground there is war. People shooting, running, shouting. Villages will be shelled, positions taken and retaken. But from up here everything looks beautiful, vast and calm. She thinks of the Jesuit priest Antoine Poidebard, the inventor of aerial archeology. In the 1930s he crisscrossed the skies over Mesopotamia, flying over Beirut, Damascus, the Syrian desert, Palmyra . . . Hundreds of hours of flying time, his eyes riveted to the ground to locate buried Roman structures, the lines of walls that time had leveled, the traces of ancient fortifications. And the Bedouin tribes watched, stunned, as the plane flew overhead; sometimes they fired at it, for fear it might bring some misfortune. She thinks about Poidebard and how he too glided over the crush of countless lives beneath him. He saw the Roman limes in the Syrian desert. He could see Antiquity surfacing, because from his airplane it was so clear, you could not miss it, whereas down below the humans who walked along those roads or lived in those villages could not see it. She thinks of Antoine Poidebard and the amassing of time. It is all there beneath her: Alexander’s campaigns, the wall that kept the Pax Romana, the lines that Churchill and the French drew during the Cairo Conference, the advance of Islamic State. She is gliding over time, over humans, their tiny destiny, and she doesn’t even see them. From where she is, the only thing that is visible is the gilded land of the East.

 

For the victory to be real, it’s not enough for the enemy be caught in a trap, with no way out and their leader dead; it’s not enough for there to be no more orders to muster the troops, with each soldier thinking only of his own life, trying to flee, and trembling with fear. For the victory to be real, you have to go all the way, and once the enemy is driven back, with the lake behind them, at a loss what to do, then you must advance and kill them. That is what they are doing now. The Iberians, the Balearics, the Punic soldiers. They surround the Romans and slay them. They slice, stab, hack. They slaughter the men as if they were a herd of sheep. One by one, patiently. Fifteen thousand men. With the weariness of repeated gestures. They do it because only afterward will they truly be able to speak of victory, only later will the news reach Rome and, for the first time, panic will spread through the streets. They mutilate bodies and slit throats, one by one, until those fifteen thousand bodies stain the waters of the lake with their blood, fifteen thousand bodies of men who this morning thought they would live and now, three hours later, are floating while the fog lifts at last to offer Hannibal the gruesome spectacle of his victory. Perhaps he is gripped by that moment? Perhaps for those three hours of hand-to-hand combat they were brothers, united in having, all of them, placed their lives in the hands of fate? Perhaps that is why he searches for Flaminius’s body on the battlefield for a long time, but he does not find it, because the consul was decapitated and his head rolled into the water; and so, Hannibal asks that they pay tribute to all the dead, including those whose throats his soldiers were still slitting only a few minutes earlier. And at last everyone falls silent as they stare at the red waters of the lake.

 

Grant knows that today he has won. He strides through the orchard at Shiloh, littered with bodies; he steps over the stiffened arms of the dead men. Around him, all the officers are dismayed by the extent of the loss. What did they think? Warfare is slaughter, that’s all it is. Nothing else. Everyone is looking at him with disgust but he knows that he has won. Even if there is a surge of anger going all the way to Lincoln, even if from now on they will call him “the Butcher.” Even if for a time they will remove him from positions of command because the other generals still dream of clean victories. He, Grant, knows the odor of battlefields. Once the smell of gunpowder has dissipated, the smell that is left is that of guts and blood. So why not, let them call him “the Butcher,” basically they’re right. So many men fell today. But he refuses to let anyone say that he lost, at Shiloh. It’s a victory. This is what victories look like: the wounded men limp, and the dying ones moan, just as they do in defeat. The only thing that matters is that Beauregard is retreating and he, Ulysses S. Grant, is advancing. And so what if it’s hell. Since it is a war, it has to be won.

 

The plane speeds across the skies of Turkey and Iraq and she seems to sense all those hundreds of millions of lives that ended in mutual massacre in these lands over the centuries. How much of all that is left? Statues, vases, temples, fortresses, staring at us in silence. Every era has known upheaval. What is left is what she, personally, is looking for. Not lives, anymore, individual destinies, but what humans have given to time, that part they want to rescue from the catastrophe, that part on which defeat has no hold, the gesture toward eternity. And today it is that part which the men in black are threatening. They wave their weapons and scream that they are not afraid of death. “Viva la muerte!” said the Spanish fascists. It is the same sort of arrogant pride, the same hatred of humankind. But what they are attacking, those men in black, is that which, normally, is exempt from battle and fire. They shoot and shell and burn the way men have always done. Antiquity is full of cities that have been ransacked—Persepolis burned, Tyre destroyed—but as a rule traces have always remained, as a rule man did not completely obliterate his enemy. What is happening now, with these men vomiting their hatred, is the ecstasy that comes with the power to erase History.