From the magazine

The art of war

Today’s peacetime soldiers, fighting battles against great abstractions such as climate change, need to remind themselves of what it means to truly suffer

Nina Power
First world war trench-art ashtray © IWM
EXPLORE THE ISSUE 15 February 2025
issue 15 February 2025

Nina Power has narrated this article for you to listen to.

On his deathbed, the Austrian writer Karl Kraus remarked of the Japanese attack on Manchuria: ‘None of this would have happened if people had only been more strict about the use of the comma.’ The implication being that by channelling rage into the ordering of small things, we might stay away from violence on a colossal scale.

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