Before I started reporting on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in autumn last year, I’d never been to an active conflict zone. As a culture writer, I stumbled into writing about Ukraine, led by my curiosity and protected, to an extent, by my naivety. I got more than I bargained for. I had never seen at such close quarters the recent, direct consequences of war – the grief-felled parents, the improvised graves, the villagers with nowhere to go but their mine-riddled land and ruined homes. I’d never before met ordinary people who had dropped everything to sign up to the military to defend their country from an invasion. Because I write about culture, these “ordinary people” have tended to be novelists and cinematographers and playwrights, the kind of people I know and write about in Britain, but whose lives, because of history’s forking paths, have taken them in a direction I hope my British friends never have to follow.
Oddly enough, one of the ways I have tried to make sense of the profound shock of total war, the way it spills into and stains everything, has been through British novels and poems of the second world war. Just now I’m reading Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal. It was written in 1938, and the way it summons London’s ordinariness cut with a seeping sense of dread seems horribly familiar: “But posters flapping on the railings tell the fluttered / World that Hitler speaks, that Hitler speaks / And we cannot take it in and we go to our daily / Jobs to the dull refrain of the caption ‘War’.”
