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.This part of the countryside is supposed to have been pacified and it’s nowhere near that.Look at the warehouse, the paramilitaries back at the farm.This place isn’t pacified, and we all know it.’He slowly nodded, took another puff at his cigarette.‘Pacified.A good word.Decades after the bloodiest war in history and after setting up the UN, one would think that this planet would be pacified, would at least have peace, that people would eventually have learned to get along with each other.But we’re not even close to that dream, my friend Samuel.Can I tell you a secret?’‘Certainly,’ I said.Jean-Paul smiled faintly.‘Not much of a secret, but here it goes.We’re losing, Samuel, and losing rather badly.What we’re doing here is probably pointless, at best.’I felt like I had just heard the parish priest speak about the attractive qualities of a demon called Satan.‘I disagree.That is one hell of a secret.Go on.’A Gallic shrug, then he said, ‘Karen said something a day or two ago, about men with guns, and the heartbreak and terror they cause.A bit simplistic, but she had a point.There was a time some years ago when we could make a difference, could keep warring countries or factions or other groups of men with guns apart.That was the era of the copper phone line and the telegraph and black-and-white television.In those days we had the luxury of time.’In the distance, over the horizon, I thought I heard the murmur of helicopters on patrol.Jean-Paul looked up with me and continued.‘But then the world got wired, got connected, so that extremists in Idaho could communicate with their brethren in Berlin, so that mujahedin in Afghanistan could give real-time lectures to their comrades in the Philippines, and so that women-haters in Iran could get support from those in the United States who wanted to put women under the lash.All this connectivity, so that the brushfires and incidents and little wars could happen, right after another, sometimes in a planned fashion.We’re like a fire department in a small village that has one little fire engine, and we’re racing from blaze to blaze, trying to put the fires out, and being very, very lucky if we can just contain them.Well,’ he said, waving a hand to the village we had passed through, ‘our luck’s not holding.’‘But what we’re doing—you can’t mean it when you said we’re not making a difference, that what we’re doing is pointless.’Jean-Paul leaned to the right and gently nudged me.‘My dear young man, what difference are we making, eh? Tell me the truth: what are we doing?’‘We’re documenting war crimes,’ I said.‘Preserving evidence, for use in future trials.To show others that, even when something criminal happens in a nation like this, there are consequences.’‘Are we preventing any bloodshed?’‘Maybe,’ I said.‘Maybe the fact that we’re here, collecting evidence, will prevent future outbreaks.’‘Aaahh, yes,’ he said.‘The old argument.Used in Kampuchea, in Rwanda, the Congo, Sierra Leone, Fiji and now here.The world community did nothing and let the bodies pile up.And when the shooting and the hacking is complete, now we will go in and count the dead and feed the living, and try to track down the criminals.And how much bloodshed has been avoided, how many lives have been saved by this process of ours?’‘Who knows?’ I said stubbornly.‘But something still has to be done.’‘Indeed, you are correct, something must still be done,’ Jean-Paul said, smiling, tapping the ash from his cigarette onto the ground.‘That’s what I thought, back when I was your age.That I would do something important.I was a lawyer in a small village in the south of France, and I thought I should do more besides prepare land-deed transfers and wills for elderly widows.I had a hunger to see the world, to do more.The curse of the French, you know.We feel we have to share our superiority with everyone.’ He laughed and even I smiled along.It was good to see him laugh, especially after the days we had been having.He continued.‘Like you, I think, my father is one who—’‘Please,’ I said.‘I really don’t want to bring my father into this.’Jean-Paul eyed me coolly.‘You must not continue to blame him for what happened in Mogadishu.It was not his fault.’‘He was in command.Everything in his command was his responsibility.Including the deaths that occurred.Sorry, Jean-Paul, it was his fault.So can we drop the matter, all right?’‘Very well,’ he said, rubbing his hands together, keeping the cigarette held at the ends of his fingers.‘I will talk, then, about my father.A tall, dour man who married my mother when he was in his fifties.He was a lawyer as well, but he always kept quiet concerning what he had done as a young man, before he started his own practice.Only after he passed on did I learn the truth about what my father did as a lawyer.You see, Samuel, during a certain time in the 1940s he was employed by the French government in a small city just north of our village, a place called Vichy.’‘Oh,’ I said.‘Yes, “oh”,’ Jean-Paul said.‘He was young and had no real power, but what little power he had aided the Nazis and their Gestapo to round up Jews in the south of France and send them to places like Treblinka and Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.That was what my father did.When I learned that, within a week I had quit my position and applied to the UN in Geneva.So here I am.’‘You and me and everybody else,’ I said.‘Your village -where is it?’‘Ah, it is in Provence, a place of warmth and beauty and fine food and wine.A place where even today you can see monuments from the Roman Empire.The arenas, the memorial arches, the old roads.’The sound of the helicopters grew louder and I scanned the horizon, still not seeing a thing.Routine patrol, perhaps.One hoped.‘I was there once, on a college trip,’ I said.‘I’m sorry to say that I think the food was overrated, except for the desserts.But the landscapes were amazing.’‘Ah, of course, quite beautiful, like this land we are in now,’ Jean-Paul said.‘But this place is still bloody, with lots of bloody memories.The early colonists.The French and Indian wars.The Civil War.So forth and so on.And my memories begin with relics of the ancient Romans.Ironic, isn’t it, that we owe so much to the Romans and their concepts of law and government.The Senate, the voice of the people, ideas and ideals handed down over thousands of years.But the Romans also gave us their legacy of slavery, of conquering other nations, of killing your enemies for sport in the arena.An odd balance, when we cherish the good and try to overlook the bad.’He finished his cigarette, dropped it to the ground and ground it out with his heel.‘And while we try to balance this, even to this day, the barbarians are out there, beyond the gates, beyond the pale, preparing their weapons, preparing to kill us all.Samuel, my apologies.’‘Excuse me—apologies for what?’ I asked,‘Apologies for giving you a lecture as if you were a schoolboy.No more lectures today.’ Jean-Paul stood up and said, ‘You are right.We have done nothing these past days but go in circles, and each time we have been in the line of fire, in some sort of danger.No longer.This afternoon, we will—’We both turned at the sound of an engine revving up, and I saw a black cloud of diesel smoke rise up from the Ukrainian APC.The rear hatch was open and the APC commander was waving frantically at Jean-Paul, who trotted down the hill with me following right behind him.The Ukrainian shouted over the noise of the APC engine: ‘Monsieur, so sorry, but we must leave! Two of our comrades, they are under fire, some distance away
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