Fog Of War Quotes

I’m reminded of Orville Tethington, inventor of the world’s first steam-powered fog machine. He’s also the guy who, after the Germans invented the flame thrower in WWI, decided to counteract it with his own creation, the candle thrower. The candle thrower was only battle tested once, and after fifteen minutes the war zone was littered with lit candles. Upon returning home after the war, some of the soldiers suffered such extreme and bizarre cases of PTSD that anytime a civilian lit a match or used their lighter, the soldiers would hit the ground and start singing “Happy Birthday.

We take pictures because we can't accept that everything passes, we can't accept that the repetition of a moment is an impossibility. We wage a monotonous war against our own impending deaths, against time that turns children into that other, lesser species: adults. We take pictures because we know we will forget. We will forget the week, the day, the hour. We will forget when we were happiest. We take pictures out of pride, a desire to have the best of ourselve preserved. We fear that we will die and others will not know we lived.

Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stock of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him crying: 'Stetson! You, who were with me in the ships at Mylae! That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, Or with his nails he'll dig it up again! You! hypocrite lecteur!-mon semblable,-mon frere!

Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.

In marching, in mobs, in football games, and in war, outlines become vague; real things become unreal and a fog creeps over the mind. Tension and excitement, weariness, movement--all merge in one great gray dream, so that when it is over, it is hard to remember how it was when you killed men or ordered them to be killed. Then other people who were not there tell you what it was like and you say vaguely, "yes, I guess that's how it was.

I was hell-bent on being an effective humanitarian in Cambodia and Somalia. But a naïve fog is finally lifting. Revealed is a train wreck of illusions, the depravity of someone else's war, the futility of a competence stillborn there. To understand this you have to become this.

You never have perfect knowledge in combat, gentlemen. It’s what we call the fog of war. You can either sit around worrying what’s real and what’s not, or you can realize the enemy hasn’t got a clue either and fire off a few rounds of psychology. A truly great army is one that only has to rattle its saber to win a war.

Chaos is indeed the normal state of affairs on the battleground, and no army has figured out a way to plan effectively for, let alone alleviate, the so-called fog of war. When the military is confronted with the fratricidal carnage that predictably results, denial and dissembling are its time-honored responses of first resort.

Trippers and askers surround me, People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation, The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new, My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues, The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love, The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations, Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; These come to me days and nights and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

The fog of horny war has lifted, but I'm still in the trenches. I'm down here, dying. I've got trench foot of the heart.

The man she had loved as a father was a fraud. He kissed the back of her hands and advocated war; he had played with her on the carpet with toy soldiers, and all along he had been planning the extinction of an entire people. There would be no resettlement in the east. No carefully orchestrated exodus of Jews from Germany, no trains wending through the mountains, carrying Jews to another home in another country. There would be no peaceful expulsion. It was obvious now; Hitler had said it himself tonight. The internal purification of the Jewish spirit is not possible. She understood. In Hitler's Germany, the Jews would have no place at all.

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense. There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days--burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob--a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for 'fifty,' blooming for fifty days--the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance. There is also the ------, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it. And the nafhat--a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen--a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as 'that which plucks the fowls.' The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, 'black wind.' The Samiel from Turkey, 'poison and wind,' used often in battle. As well as the other 'poison winds,' the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness. Other, private winds. Travelling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads. The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the 'sea of darkness.' Red sand fogs out of the Sahara were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon, producing showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood. 'Blood rains were widely reported in Portugal and Spain in 1901.' There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and more living flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing and existing on it. Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. One nation was 'so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.

To: Anna Oliphant From: Etienne St. Clair Subject: HAPPY CHRISTMAS Have you gotten used to the time difference? Bloody hell,I can't sleep. I'd call,but I don't know if you're awake or doing the family thing or what. The bay fog is so thick that I can't see out my window.But if I could, I am quite certain I'd discover that I'm the only person alive in San Francisco. To: Anna Oliphant From: Etienne St. Clair Subject: I forgot to tell you. Yesterday I saw a guy wearing an Atlanta Film Festival shirt at the hospital.I asked if he knew you,but he didn't.I also met an enormous,hair man in a cheeky Mrs. Claus getup. he was handing out gifts to the cancer patients.Mum took the attached picture. Do I always look so startled? To: Anna Oliphant From: Etienne St. Clair Subject: Are you awake yet? Wake up.Wake up wake up wake up. To: Etienne St. Clair From: Anna Oliphant Subject: re: Are you awake yet? I'm awake! Seany started jumping on my bed,like,three hours ago. We've been opening presents and eating sugar cookies for breakfast. Dad gave me a gold ring shaped like a heart. "For Daddy's sweetheart," he said. As if I'm the type of girl who'd wear a heart-shaped ring. FROM HER FATHER. He gave Seany tons of Star Wars stuff and a rock polishing kit,and I'd much rather have those.I can't beleive Mom invited him here for Christmas. She says it's because their divorce is amicable (um,no) and Seany and I need a father figure in our lives,but all they ever do is fight.This morning it was about my hair.Dad wants me to dye it back, because he thinks I look like a "common prostitute," and Mom wants to re-bleach it.Like either of them has a say. Oops,gotta run.My grandparents just arrived,and Granddad is bellowing for his bonnie lass.That would be me. P.S. Love the picture.Mrs. Claus is totally checking out your butt. And it's Merry Christmas, weirdo. To: Anna Oliphant From: Etienne St. Clair Subject: HAHAHA@ Was it a PROMISE RING? Did your father give you a PROMISE RING? To: Etienne St. Clair From: Anna Oliphant Subject: Re: HAHAHA! I am so not responding to that.

War always seemed distant from Bogota, like niebla descending on the hills and forests of the countryside and jungles. The way it approached us was like a fog as well, without us realizing, until it sat embroiling everything around us.

There it was, a sign above a shop that said 221B BAKER STREET. My mouth hung open. I looked around at the ordinary street and the white-painted buildings, looking clean in the morning rain. Where were the fog, the streetlights, the gray atmosphere? The horses pulling carriages, bringing troubled clients to Watson and Holmes? I had to admit I had been impressed with Big Ben and all, but for a kid who had devoured the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, this was really something. I was on Baker Street, driving by the rooms of Holmes and Watson! I sort of wished it were all in black and white and gray, like in the movies.

Fears and hopes and dreams and sorrows all will dissolve like the fog they are, and what will be left is the light and warmth of my deepest self or soul or whatever it might be.

Some tyrants are brought to justice by those upon whom their boots have tread. Others simply fade into the fog of war and disappear like with the wind.

The fog of horny war has lifted, but I'm in the trenches. I'm down here, dying. I've go trench foot of the heart.

The precise origins of the Mage Wars have been lost in the fogs of Time, but Disc philosophers agree that the First Men, shortly after their creation, understandably lost their temper.

Then everything turned brilliant white for a second, and Jacob's eyes were stunned. The shock faded, but then another flash came, dulled by the darkness of the fog. Blades of lightning broke through the sea of smoke, accompanied by the violent clap of thunder, as if an angry god saw the storm devour them, and burst out into wild applause.

In my yellow room, Sunflowers with purple eyes stands out on a yellow background. They bath their stems in a yellow pot, on a yellow table. In a corner of the painting, the signature of the painter: Vincent. And the yellow sun that passes through the yellow curtains of my room floods all this fluorescence with gold. And in the morning upon awakening, from my bed, I imagin that all this smells very good. Oh yes! He loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from holland. Those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul That abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth. When two of us were together in arles, both of us mad and at constant war over the beauty of color, me, i loved the color red, Where to find a perfect vermilion? He traced with his most yellow brush on the wall, Suddenly turned violet. Je suis saint esprit Je suis sain d'espri. Paul gauguin, 1894.

It’s entirely possible that the Jedi’s increasingly clouded vision was the result of their own moral degeneration. They’d let so many of their principles slip that the reason they couldn’t see the dark side was so close to them was the lack of sharp contrast with themselves, like trying to see a gray nerf in fog. They turned off the light themselves. —Bardan Jusik, former Jedi Knight Kyrimorut,

One night the month before, back on the other side of the Belgian border, Aughenbaugh had delivered a lecture on the etymology of the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an ancient Indo-European root signifying confusion. That was a foxhole night, bitter cold. The 5th Panzer Army was making its last great push west. You had to hand it to those Indo-Europeans, my grandfather thought, rolling through Vellinghausen. Confusion shown on the faces of the townspeople. War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs. It confounded conquest with liberation, anger with heartache, hunger with gratitude, hatred with awe. The 53rd Combat Engineers looked pretty confused, too. They were milling around at the edge of town, contemplating the long stretch of road between and beautiful downtown Berlin, trying to figure out if they ought to mine it or clear it of mines.

War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs.

Love, at its best, wipes commonsense Away. Much as drops will condense From hidden liquid in the air, So, too, do lovers soon compare Their temp’ratures til, happily, Their judgement fogs up suddenly.

Clausewitz’s posthumously published work On War, shaped by the age of Napoleonic warfare, is best known for the concept of the friction and the fog of war and the “Clausewitzian dictum” that war is but the continuation of politics by other means. Clausewitz is still taught at military academies and war colleges across the globe, and his theories continue to inform how military men and women think about war in the twenty-first century.

We Catholics have not only to do our best to keep down our own warring passions and live decent lives, which will often be hard enough in this odd world we have been born into. We have to bear witness to moral principles which the world owned yesterday and has begun to turn its back on today. We have to disapprove of some of the things our neighbors do, without being stuffy about it; we have to be charitable towards our neighbors and make great allowances for them, without falling into the mistake of condoning their low standards and so encouraging them to sin. Two of the most difficult and delicate tasks a man can undertake; and it happens, nowadays, not only to priests, to whom it comes as part of their professional duty, but to ordinary lay people...So we must know what are the unalterable principles we hold, and why we hold them; we must see straight in a world that is full of moral fog.

Why did she want to stay in England? Because the history she was interested in had happened here, and buried deep beneath her analytical mind was a tumbled heap of Englishness in all its glory, or kings and queens, of Runnymede and Shakespeare's London, of hansom cabs and Sherlock Holmes and Watson rattling off into the fog with cries of 'The game's afoot,' of civil wars bestrewing the green land with blood, of spinning jennies and spotted pigs and Churchill and his country standing small and alone against the might of Nazi Germany. It was a mystery to her how this benighted land had produced so many great men and women, and ruled a quarter of the world and spread its language and law and democracy across the planet.

Of all the war crimes which he claimed he had to commit on the orders of Hitler “the worst of all,” General Keitel said on the stand at Nuremberg, stemmed from the Nacht und Nebel Erlass—“Night and Fog Decree.” This grotesque order, reserved for the unfortunate inhabitants of the conquered territories in the West, was issued by Hitler himself on December 7, 1941. Its purpose, as the weird title indicates, was to seize persons “endangering German security” who were not to be immediately executed and make them vanish without a trace into the night and fog of the unknown in Germany. No information was to be given their families as to their fate even when, as invariably occurred, it was merely a question of the place of burial in the Reich. On December 12, 1941, Keitel issued a directive explaining the Fuehrer’s orders. “In principle,” he said, “the punishment for offenses committed against the German state is the death penalty.” But if these offenses are punished with imprisonment, even with hard labor for life, this will be looked upon as a sign of weakness. Efficient intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and the population do not know his fate.42 The following February Keitel enlarged on the Night and Fog Decree. In cases where the death penalty was not meted out within eight days of a person’s arrest, the prisoners are to be transported to Germany secretly… these measures will have a deterrent effect because (a) the prisoners will vanish without leaving a trace, (b) no information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate.

Anyways, the guys try to be cool. They just lie there and groove, but after a while they start hearing - you won't believe this - they hear chamber music. They hear violins and cellos. They hear this terrific mama-san soprano. Then after a while they hear gook opera and and a glee club and the Haiphong Boys Choir and a barbershop quartet and and all kinds of wierd chanting and Buddha-Buddha stuff. All the whole time, in the background, there's stil that cocktail party going on. All these different voices. Not human voices, though. Because it's the mountains. Follow me? The rock, it's TALKING. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses. Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monnkeys talk religion. The whole country. Vietnam. The place talks. It talks. Understand? Nam - it truly TALKS.

Wells says that, "strange Mystery Men were dimly visible through a fog of baffling evasions and mis-statements, manipulating prices and exchanges. Prominent among these Mystery Men was a certain Mr. Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1935." Not surprisingly, this is the same Montagu Norman who was a rabid pre-war partisan of Hitler, and who participated with Hjalmar Schacht, with American intelligence, with Wall Street, and with the Rothschild/Warburg/Schiff banks in the creation of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.

The death of George Floyd has been used as a catalyst. It was the kind of “event” for which the aforesaid revolutionary formation (Black Lives Matter) was created. Now, Black Lives Matter has become a power in its own right. It is only the ignorance of the many, and the “fog of war,” that makes the casual observer dubious as to authorship of the present insurrection. For those who have not studied communist tactics, further shocks are in store. The existing political system failed to support the thin blue line, and that line is crumbling. The communists are winning.

He joined because he was trapped like a caged animal. He joined because a man who gets up at 4 a.m. every morning, climbs a mountain in rain or fog or killing heat, and sweats all day with mosquitoes in his mouth does not need an empire telling him how to live, which flag to wave, what language to speak, and what heroes to worship.

A furtive light knifed through the fog to reveal a singular mirage: the marching cavalry appeared suspended between earth and sky. Libbie Custer shivered with a presentiment of tragedy. “The future of the heroic band seemed revealed, and already there seemed a premonition in the supernatural translation as their forms were reflected from the opaque mist of the early dawn.

The fog made things seem hollow and unattached. He tried not to think about Ted Lavender, but then he was thinking how fast it was, no dram, down and dead, and how it was hard to feel anything except surprise. It seemed unchristian. He wished he could find some great sadness, or even anger, but the emotion wasn't there and he couldn't make it happen. Mostly he felt pleased to be alive.

He enjoyed not being dead. Lying there, Kiowa admired Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's capacity for grief. He wanted to share the man's pain, he wanted to care as Jimmy Cross cared. And yet when he closed his eyes, all he could think was Boom-down, and all he could feel was the pleasure of having his boots off and the fog curling in around him and the damp soil and the Bible smells and the plush comfort of night.

So, my number: Twenty-five. It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed. Naturally, I’d have preferred not to have that number on my military CV, on my mind, but by the same token I’d have preferred to live in a world in which there was no Taliban, a world without war. Even for an occasional practitioner of magical thinking like me, however, some realities just can’t be changed. While in the heat and fog of combat, I didn’t think of those twenty-five as people. You can’t kill people if you think of them as people. You can’t really harm people if you think of them as people. They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods. I’d been trained to “other-ize” them, trained well. On some level I recognized this learned detachment as problematic. But I also saw it as an unavoidable part of soldiering. Another

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous" i Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest. i You, drowning                         between my arms — stay. You, pushing your body                          into the river only to be left                          with yourself — stay. i I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls. And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing to surrender. i Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.                    Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. Say autumn despite the green                    in your eyes. Beauty despite daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn                    mounting in your throat. My thrashing beneath you                    like a sparrow stunned with falling. i Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining. i I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once. i Say amen. Say amend. Say yes. Say yes anyway. i In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed. i In the life before this one, you could tell two people were in love because when they drove the pickup over the bridge, their wings would grow back just in time. Some days I am still inside the pickup. Some days I keep waiting. i It’s not too late. Our heads haloed             with gnats & summer too early to leave any marks.             Your hand under my shirt as static intensifies on the radio.             Your other hand pointing your daddy’s revolver             to the sky. Stars falling one by one in the cross hairs.             This means I won’t be afraid if we’re already             here. Already more than skin can hold. That a body             beside a body must ma

It was the language that left us first. The Great Migration of words. When people spoke they punched each other in the mouth. There was no vocabulary for love. Women became masculine and could no longer give birth to warmth or a simple caress with their lips. Tongues were overweight from profanity and the taste of nastiness. It settled over cities like fog smothering everything in sight. My ears begged for camouflage and the chance to go to war. Everywhere was the decay of how we sound.

It was not great mystery, he decided. In those burned letters Martha had never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. She wasn't involved. She signed the letters Love, but it wasn't love, and all the fine lines and technicalities did not matter. Virginity was no longer an issue. He hated her. Yes, he did. He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love. The morning came up wet and blurry. Everything seemed part of everything else, the fog and Martha and the deepening rain. He was a soldier, after all.

It was the mist which made everything strange, spread across the land, a seven-foot-thick blanket, stretched almost uniformly over the flat bottom of the valley, and the gentle slopes leading down into it. As silent as the mist, Codrin’s army moved out of the forest. An observer high above the ground would see rows of floating heads, arranged in a matrix, the distance between them almost regular. Having helmets of many different colors, the heads offered a striking contrast to the white-gray monotony of the mist. An army of floating heads. Unaware of their weird appearance from above, the heads continued their journey down, toward Lenard’s army. To an observer on the ground, nothing could be seen until it was too late. Lenard’s sleeping soldiers woke up when the ground trembled to the rhythm of more than a thousand horses trampling everything in their way. They woke up, and they died. Some of them died while they slept. When the last cry died away, and the fog finally lifted, the surviving men surrendered. At the end of the clash, which became known as the Battle of the Mist, Codrin found that he had lost only fifteen men. Lenard had lost half of his army, his son and his life.

When, in May, tensions reached a high point, London warned Berlin that if it attacked Czechoslovakia and the French were embroiled as well, "His Majesty's Government could not guarantee that they would not be forced by circumstances to become involved also". Ar the same time, English officials were telling their counterparts in Paris that they were "not disinterested" in Czechoslovakia's fate. I learned in the course of my own career that British diplomats are trained to write in with precision; so when a double negative is employed, the intent, usually, is not to clarify an issue but to surround it with fog.

The failure of emancipation to take root during the war is one of the great What ifs of the Revolution. Another is: What if blacks had not fought for the American cause? What if a slave had not saved Colonel William Washington’s life, with the result that his cavalry charge dissolved and the Battle of Cowpens had become a British victory? As the historian Thomas Fleming speculates, both North and South Carolina might well have gone over to the British. What if Glover’s regiment of Massachusetts sailors had not had the manpower to complete the evacuation of Washington’s army before the fog lifted in New York—and Washington himself, waiting for the last boat, had been captured? *

This process yields a psychological gain. Firstly, the anxiety that previously roamed through society as a tenebrous fog is now linked to a specific cause and can be mentally controlled via the strategy put forward in the story. Secondly, through a common struggle with “the enemy,” the disintegrating society regains its coherence, energy, and rudimentary meaning. For this reason, the fight against the object of anxiety then becomes a mission, laden with pathos and group heroism (for example, the Belgian government’s “team of 11 million” going to war against the coronavirus). Thirdly, in this fight all latent brewing frustration and aggression is taken out, especially on the group that refuses to go along with the story and the mass formation. This brings an enormous release and satisfaction to the masses, which they will not let go of easily. Through this process,

The wars break out and die down, but then there’s a flareup elsewhere. Houses cracked open like eggs, their contents torched or stolen or stomped vindictively underfoot; refugees strafed from airplanes. In a million cellars the bewildered royal family faces the firing squad; the gems sewn into their corsets will not save them. Herod’s troops patrol a thousand streets; just next door, Napoleon makes off with the silverware. In the wake of the invasion, any invasion, the ditches fill up with raped women. To be fair, raped men as well. Raped children, raped dogs and cats. Things can get out of control. But not here; not in this gentle, tedious backwater; not in Port Ticonderoga, despite a druggie or two in the parks, despite the occasional break-in, despite the occasional body found floating around in the eddies. We hunker down here, drinking our bedtime drinks, nibbling our bedtime snacks, peering at the world as if through a secret window, and when we’ve had enough of it we turn it off. So much for the twentieth century, we say, as we make our way upstairs. But there’s a far-off roaring, like a tidal wave racing inshore. Here comes the twentyfirst century, sweeping overhead like a spaceship filled with ruthless lizard-eyed aliens or a metal pterodactyl. Sooner or later it will sniff us out, it will tear the roofs off our flimsy little burrows with its iron claws, and then we will be just as naked and shivering and starving and diseased and hopeless as the rest. Excuse this digression. At my age you indulge in these apocalyptic visions. You say, The end of the world is at hand. You lie to yourself – I’m glad I won’t be around to see it – when in fact you’d like nothing better, as long as you can watch it through the little secret window, as long as you won’t be involved. But why bother about the end of the world? It’s the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown. What happened next? For a moment I’ve lost the thread, it’s hard for me to remember, but then I do. It was the war, of course. We weren’t prepared for it, but at the same time we knew we’d been there before. It was the same chill, the chill that rolled in like a fog, the chill into which I was born.

My logistics officer (S-4), Maj. Bob Melton, joined me in the search to find out what had happened when suddenly the acrid fog began to lift. I looked north toward the buildings behind my headquarters. Then, as I turned to the south, Melton gasped, “My God, the BLT building is gone!” As I absorbed the magnitude of the scene before me, I experienced a moment of disbelief like no other. The sickening knot in my stomach grew more intense. The BLT Headquarters building billeted more than three hundred Marines, sailors, and soldiers. I was crying hard on the inside but had no time for personal feelings. There was work to be done.

Friction thus caused delay and confusion. Action in war became like walking in water, and vision was regularly obscured. “All actions take place in something virtually akin to dusk, which in addition, like fog or moonlight, gives objects an exaggerated size and a grotesque view.

The famous fog of war confuses understanding while the fighting rages. Another kind of fog shrouds understanding afterwards. Winners, we all know, write the histories and those histories inevitably justify. Justification of war, especially offensive war, generally requires a heavy dose of mythmaking, with myths that ennoble one’s own side and demonize the other.

The threat of war hung on the air like a thick fog and it blinded him until he could see nothing beyond the haze. Even the stars grew faint.

In battle, soldiers are often dazed or inhibited by the “fog of war.” This fog comes from smoke, explosions, shell shock, lack of information, etc. As a parent of twins, you have your own fog of war. This fog is thickest during your twins’ first year.

It hasn't been so easy for me, either," Alessandro said. "Not recently. But I'll die before I'm mad like you." "That's your choice," Orfeo told him. "Me, as surely as I stand upon this commode, I'll have the power to wait for the gracious sap. I'll wait in fog, rain, or on the mountaintop, but I'll wait, and the blessed sap will come, and do you know what it will do? I'll tell you. It will fuck the typewriter." Alessandro was stunned. Still, he managed to say, "I saw typewriters in the hall of scribes." "No one said the battle would be easy. They creep upon me like a lapping tick. All day long, tick-tock tick-tock tick-tock, ding! Tick-tock tick-tock tick-tock, ding! Whoever invented that machine...!" His eyes fired in rage.

The people at the front are young, energetic, and incredibly brave. There’s a Black girl, in her twenties, skinny as a rail, with a black kerchief over her face. The kerchief is useful in both pandemics and the fog of tear gas. She wears skinny jeans and a black T-shirt with “Black Lives Matter” on it. Some white adults are as offended by her choice of wardrobe as she is by their overall indifference. She’s opposed by much larger men, outfitted like extras in Mad Max or RoboCop. The only thing threatening about her is her mouth and her willpower. On Facebook, the police and their family don’t even create original slogans, but instead co-opt hers by posting things like “all lives matter” and “blue lives matter.” It seems to be their way of saying that her “Black life” doesn’t matter. Whites who favor the protesters have to justify their leanings, like they’re traitors to a race war that they didn’t start and don’t believe in... This girl is intelligent and talented, someone who should be leading this country into the twenty-first century. Instead, she’s out in the street risking her life because she dares to be dissatisfied.

My preferred mode of travel to and from the island is the fast ferry. From April through December, both the Steamship Authority and Hy-Line Cruises operate ferries throughout the day. The trip takes an hour, and round trip costs around eighty dollars. Weather often affects travel to and from the island. If the wind is blowing twenty-five miles an hour or stronger, the ferries may cancel (each trip is at the discretion of the captain). If there is fog (which there often is in June and early July), planes are grounded. (Fun fact: Tom Nevers Field was used by the U.S. military in World War II to practice taking off and landing in the fog.) Once on Nantucket, you can either rent a Jeep (Nantucket Windmill Auto Rental, Nantucket Island Rent a Car) or rent a bike (Young’s Bicycle Shop, Nantucket Bike

the fog in her mind. The fox saw the hole, too, and angled toward it, trying to reach the hole before she did and cut her off.

Edith’s heart surged whenever a spark of clarity flickered in the fog, when her real father came back to her, if only for a fleeting moment.

I’ve known for at least 30-40 years: You cannot control anyone except yourself, so I went to war against myself, and tried to control, mangle and corral myself into being perfect, and into being able to tolerate and to accept anything, without needing or wanting anything, and without judging or discerning anything about anyone ever. And it STILL wasn’t enough.

Rays of evening sunshine glinted across the wood rails of the porch, hints of a thunderstorm flickering along the fog over the ridges. A sudden wind whipped through the trees, sending dried leaves to the ground. The sky was at war, Mother Nature caught between the chill of the dead and the wicked heat of the devil as he lingered in the foothills

But when they had marched for about an hour in the dense fog, the greater part of the men had to halt and an unpleasant consciousness of some dislocation and blunder spread through the ranks. How such a consciousness is communicated is very difficult to define, but it certainly is communicated very surely, and flows rapidly, imperceptibly, and irrepressibly, as water does in a creek.

Leadership is a lonely business. You live 24/7 with uncertainty, anxiety, and the fear of personal failure. You make countless decisions, and being wrong about any of them might let down your employees and investors. The stakes, both financial and human, are high. And what adds to the terror is that there is no manual, no how‐to guide. Every problem has, at least to some extent, never been seen before. In particular, early‐stage enterprises often feel like they're shrouded in a fog of war.

Sennacherib: I swiftly marched to Babylon which I was intent upon conquering. I blew like the onrush of a hurricane and enveloped the city like a fog. I completely surrounded it and captured it by breaching and scaling the walls. I did not spare his mighty warriors, young or old, but filled the city square with their corpses...I turned over to my men to keep the property of that city, silver, gold, gems, all the moveable goods. My men took hold of the statues of the gods in the city and smashed them. They took possession of the property of the gods. The statues of Adad and Shala, gods of the city Ekallati that Marduk-nadin-ahe, king of Babylonia, had taken to Babylon at the time of Tiglath Pileser I, King of Assyria, I brought out of Babylon after four hundred and eighteen years. I returned them to the city of Ekallati. The city and houses I completely destroyed from foundations to roof and set fire to them. I tore down both inner and outer city walls, temples, temple-towers made of brick and clay - as many as there were - and threw everything into the Arahtu canal. I dug a ditch inside the city and thereby levelled off the earth on its site with water. I destroyed even the outline of its foundations. I flattened it more than any flood could have done. In order that the site of that city and its temples would never be remembered, I devastated it with water so that it became a mere meadow.

We’re living within a fog—one that will lift and expose the truth.

In the early seventies a fog of grievance settled over the land. Never have Americans hated authorities like they did after the Vietnam War turned sour; after Watergate taught us the incorrigible venality of our elected leaders. Big government seemed omnipotent and yet incompetent; it possessed the world’s greatest military machine but it couldn’t do anything right. In the long list of groups it aimed to serve, We the People always seemed to come last. This snarling mood of disillusionment was the characteristic sensibility of the decade: the “wellsprings of trust” had been “poisoned,” two self-designated populist authors wrote back in 1972.1 They are still poisoned today. The whole country was mad as hell, to use a favorite catchphrase, and the discontent seemed to go in every direction at once. It was economic, it was political; it was racial, it was cultural; it was liberal, it was conservative. Americans despised the CIA and also the Soviet Union. We cheered for Clint Eastwood as a rule-breaking cop who blasted lowlifes even when the lawyers told him to stop … and then we cheered for Burt Reynolds as a “bandit” in a black Trans Am, the roads behind him littered with the smoking remains of the Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia highway patrols. Responding to the new sensibility, our politicians tried to impress us with their humility. They courted us with soft southern accents, with tales of peanut farms and pork rinds. They posed as defenders of the people, the forgotten man, the silent majority, the great overtaxed middle, the “normal” Americans suffering the contempt of shadowy TV network elites.

The truth was that no one, not even Admirals Fletcher or Spruance, knew precisely how the battle was unfolding. It was too big, too spread out; too much was happening at once, and what little data could be pieced together may or may not be reliable. They were all feeling their way through the fog of war.

The fog was made more beautiful by its passing, like flags in the spring; like the last drone of cicadas in a dying summer; like the brief yellow of hickories, the purple of sweetgums, in the fall. You loved most the things that passed away, that you couldn't hold on to, no matter how much you loved them.

She went down softly in the distance, nothing more than a feather falling gently against a pond, barely visible through the red mist and dark fog surrounding her. Not a sound was heard beside the caw of the crows nearby and the rustling of leaves. ​The cries of the damned, after all, were seen but never heard.

The Mist of Mismanagement is similar to Clausewitz’s fog of war. Uncertainty impedes situational awareness, but unlike the fog of war, the mist is self-inflicted. It unnecessarily disrupts communication, engagement, and unity of action leading to organizational failures.

Once, he knew, he had said, “Nissyen and Evnissyen. Why were they so different, those two sons of the curse?” Bran’s Head had answered, mellow thunder out of that glowing fog, “Both of them were parts of an Immortal, and Nissyen is not such a part of it as ordinarily is born again into a body of our world. But he chose birth, he came back into this schoolroom that he had outgrown, to keep Evnissyen from doing too much harm.” “Indeed,” said Manawyddan, “I cannot see what harm he ever managed to keep Evnissyen from doing.” “He did much,” said the Head. “He kept you and me from going to war with each other instead of with Ireland. And he made Evnissyen, whose only power was hate, love him, so that in the end the boy broke the bonds that he had been forging upon himself throughout the ages, and sacrificed himself to save us.

They’re all there,” I started to say— But then, where there had been nothing, there was suddenly something. The fog shifted, moved, changed, thickened and thinned at once, sculpting. And I could see them, feel them — people everywhere, surrounding us, figures unfurling from the mist. Nura let out a wordless shout of warning. She raised her hands and shadows roiled around her, around us, shielding us beneath a cover of darkness. The last thing I saw before darkness overtook my vision was the Syrizen’s spears lighting up with warm, orange light, their bodies leaping into the air and flickering into nothing. Simply disappearing. A deafening crash. Blue sparks barely penetrated Nura’s blanket of shadows. I felt the cobblestones under my boots shift. Smoke filled my lungs. My eyes groped frantically in the darkness, finding nothing but black. But then something beyond sight — deeper than sight — sensed a presence beside us, sensed a blade lifting and swinging toward Max— I didn’t think before I grabbed his shoulders and pushed, sliding my body in front of his, grabbing onto the presence and twisting and pulling and snapping as hard as I could. A sharp pain sliced my hands, raised in front of my face— Then I felt myself being yanked backwards, felt the ground shake, felt a sharp impact at the back of my head. And then the darkness melted into something deeper.

There is a well-known name for this detachment from reality that strikes the less agile side: the fog of war. Boyd’s observations on the effects of agility boil down to the conclusion that by becoming more agile than your competitors, you can cause the fog of war to grow in their minds, thereby decreasing the quality of their decisions and eventually attacking their abilities to make effective decisions altogether. A similar effect, a breakdown in the quality of energy, is well known to students of physics as “entropy.” The energy is still there, but it isn’t available for doing work. The insidious thing about entropy is that within a closed system, it always increases. In other words, closed systems run down. In a competitive situation, the less agile competitor will begin to act like a closed system and the fog of war, or the fog of business, for that matter, begins to grow within. And fog plus menace, as Boyd often noted, is a good formula for generating frustration and eventually, panic.

Shined shoes save lives.”1 Norm went on to explain that in the heat of battle, the fog of war, under pressure, the undisciplined die.

In marching, in mobs, in football games, and in war, outlines become vague; real things become unreal and a fog creeps over the mind. Tension and excitement, weariness, movement—all merge in one great gray dream, so that when it is over, it is hard to remember how it was when you killed men or ordered them to be killed. Then other people who were not there tell you what it was like and you say vaguely, “Yes, I guess that’s how it was.

people made terrible decisions all the time, and you couldn’t steer them right. They didn’t want your advice. Most people only wanted to hear their opinions coming out of your mouth. Once you strayed into giving them the hard truths, they turned their ears off and went about their business after punching you in the face.

It’s hard to capture and explain the fog and friction of war,” Colonel John Brunderman says of his experiences in the bunker beneath the Pentagon on 9/11. A command post that “functions as the top of the pyramid for all U.S. command posts around the world.” A classified facility that ensures “connectivity for the Single Integrated Operational Plan execution, worldwide situation monitoring, and crisis management.

And yet, in the fog of war, uncertainty remains.

Nobody can “treat” a war, or abuse, rape, molestation, or any other horrendous event, for that matter; what has happened cannot be undone. But what can be dealt with are the imprints of the trauma on body, mind, and soul: the crushing sensations in your chest that you may label as anxiety or depression; the fear of losing control; always being on alert for danger or rejection; the self-loathing; the nightmares and flashbacks; the fog that keeps you from staying on task and from engaging fully in what you are doing; being unable to fully open your heart to another human being.

The fog of war was a real thing that interfered with one’s battle vision and the ability to see the whole picture clearly. So impaired, it is easy for minor judgment mistakes to pile up to become major errors.” Shane Van Aulen - Star Wolves 2023

The aim of what the Russians call infoshum, ‘info-noise’, is not so much to persuade people of one line or another as to raise a fog of falsehood, to make it seem impossible to know what is true and what is false. In the process, it becomes all the easier to disrupt other countries and to undermine their will and ability to act with decisiveness.

If I Can't Love You" If I can't love you, then I want to live on some blind sea, Wherever the freighters squint along the horizon, Wherever it is your look arrives from, that is, wherever The branches dream of rain, wherever your goodbye Grasps the stems of stars, someplace where the day Learns to live leaf by leaf, where night quivers on the lake, A place, this place, where I arrive even before my dreams, Before my shadow that hobbles along still tied to the earth. But if I can't love you, not even wherever it is your words Arrive from, words that kiss the dust into clouds, words That scratch the back door, that travel a road no one knows Except for the night stopping here and there to cover an old wound, If I can't love you then, I can no longer apologize for the world, For the volcanic heart of the man reaching for his pistol, For the screams held in broken glass along the highway, For the mouths of the dead still asking for water. If I can't love you, then I want each breath to track you To wherever it is your look arrives from, through some fog Muzzling the streets, over some scorpion burrowing the desert, Beyond the canyon that refuses my echo, beyond the sky That splinters on the horizon, wherever it is your letters Never return from, where the eyes in the windows are all shut, Because the assassins are alive in the stones, because The wars are gathering their orchestras of arrogance and hate. If I can't love you, then no smile can have a face of its own, The fire of yesterday's sun has already been swept into space, Into wherever it is your look arrives from, the way the lizard Disappears into the rocks, the way the past is emptied from my shoes, Because wherever it is your look arrives from, these words approach Like miners chipping through granite, heavy with apology And love, with a fragrant guilt that embarrasses the flowers, Approaching a place, wherever it is, where I will deserve you. Richard Jackson

Discipline is good. General Norm Schwarzkopf (of Operation Desert Storm fame) once said: “Shined shoes save lives.”1 Norm went on to explain that in the heat of battle, the fog of war, under pressure, the undisciplined die. So it is in business.

The holoCan washes them in pale light. Government news programs tell them to seek shelter. In her pocket the girl carries a folded piece of paper that she found in the gutter. On it is a little curved sword. She’s seen it before on the cube. Her teachers at the government school say it brings chaos. War. It has set the spheres on fire. But now she secretly draws the blade in the fog her breath has made on the window, and she feels brave. Then the bombs begin to fall.

Perpetually shrouded in a dense, clammy fog, Cardington was a depressing place, and the only really contented mortal there that chill November was the resident observer, who used to ascend to 2000 feet every morning in a balloon, and spend the day sitting happily with a book in the autumn sunshine.

War is incidental to ideology, and this was certainly true for the war instigated by Adolf Hitler. Historians have aptly documented that Hitler knew he needed the fog of war and a radicalized population in order to enact the most extreme policies. This was equally true for both Germans and the people of their conquered territories. The war allowed Hitler the cover and justification to radicalize the T4 Euthanasia program against those lives deemed “not worth living” by pointing to the costs of maintaining those “useless eaters” during a time of war. It allowed license for Karl Brandt to “clear hospital beds” in the name of the war effort. The war’s conquered territory also brought conquered populations and increased the number of “unfit” and “undesired” population, including the Jewish population of Eastern Europe. The methods and technology of the T4 Euthanasia program were subsequently transferred from the German hospitals to the extermination camps, doctors, nurses, equipment, and all. This transference and repurposing of resources was all decided in the infamous Wannsee Conference, which we now know was the beginning of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”:“The aim of all this was to cleanse German living space of Jews in a legal manner.” (From the text of the Wannsee Protocol)

In my experience, Jesus always welcomes honest doubters. He reveals himself and reasons with us while we process his truth. He tenderly reminds us what we already know but sometimes forget. Many times Jesus has met me in my fog of incomplete and inadequate perceptions. I cried out in intellectual confusion and frustration, and he answered with gentleness and patience, providing the help I needed. He will do the same for anyone not at war with him.

With means, if more than a little diminished means, of his own Ethan had done what his father before him, likewise a lawyer, had done, and had once in days past counselled him to do before it was too late, before this might spell an irrevocable retirement. He made a Retreat. (To be sure he had not been bidden so far afield as had his father, who’d spent the last year of peace before the First World War as a legal adviser on international cotton law in Czarist Russia, whence he brought back to his young son in Wales, or so he announced, lifting it whole out of a mysterious deep-Christmas-smelling wooden box, a beautiful toy model of Moscow; a city of tiny magical gold domes, pumpkin- or Christmas-bell-shaped, sparkling with Christmas tinsel-scented snow, bright as new silver half-crowns, and of minuscule Byzantine chimes; and at whose miniature frozen street corners waited minute sleighs, in which Ethan had imagined years later lilliputian Tchitchikovs brooding, or corners where lurked snow-bound Raskolnikovs, their hands stayed from murder evermore: much later still he was to become unsure whether the city, sprouting with snow-freaked onions after all, was intended to be Moscow or St. Petersburg, for part of it seemed in memory built on little piles in the water, like Eridanus; the city coming out of the box he was certain was magic too—for he had never seen it again after that evening of his father’s return, in a strange astrakhan-collared coat and Russian fur cap—the box that was always to be associated also with his mother’s death, which had occurred shortly thereafter; the magic bulbar city going back into the magic scented box forever, and himself too afraid of his father to ask him about it later—though how beautiful for years to him was the word city, the carilloning word city in the Christmas hymn, Once in Royal David’s City, and the tumultuous angel-winged city that was Bunyan’s celestial city; beautiful, that was, until he saw a city—it was London—for the first time, sullen, in fog, and bloodshot as if with the fires of hell, and he had never to this day seen Moscow—so that while this remained in his memory as nearly the only kind action he could recall on the part of either of his parents, if not nearly the only happy memory of his entire childhood, he was constrained to believe the gift had actually been intended for someone else, probably for the son of one of his father’s clients: no, to be sure he hadn’t wandered as far afield as Moscow; nor had he, like his younger brother Gwyn, wanting to go to Newfoundland, set out, because he couldn’t find another ship, recklessly for Archangel; he had not gone into the desert nor to sea himself again or entered a monastery, and moreover he’d taken his wife with him; but retreat it was just the same.)

When I had arrived home and learned of this terrible series of events, I had immediately set out for the Hawk’s Keep. I had started that ride in a fog of denial, refusing to acknowledge that my brother was dead, refusing to believe that the burden of the roal seat had fallen to me so suddenly at the age of sixteen. The hours had turned my thoughts from disbelief to mad fury. I had scaled the walls of the Hawk’s Keep, intent on murder, and stumbled into the room of Danica Shardae. And there, I think I fell in love. As I beheld the avian princess sleeping so innocently, her cheek marked by a new cut--probably by one of my own people’s blades--my hatred died, leaving only a desperate desire for peace in its wake. When the mad suggestion was made last winter that taking the enemy queen as my mate could end the war, it had almost seemed like fate. It had not been easy to bridge the gaps between us, but together we had managed. Fate had given me many gifts. Danica Shardae was the one for which I would forever be most grateful.

Behind the Jesus Is Here sign are too many narcissistic competitors in what has rightly been called “the worship wars,” a consumerist competition to draw a bigger audience into a fog of Jesus-lite entertainment. How long could Jesus remain on his feet when directed to sing fifteen consecutive worship choruses, each one only seven words long and repeated twenty-three times?

The first camp to be discovered in the west was the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in Alsace, which the French army entered on 23 November 1944. Natzweiler-Struthof was one of the principal Nacht und Nebel camps – those institutions that were designed to make suspected Resistance fighters disappear into the ‘night and fog’. Here the French discovered a small gas chamber, where prisoners were hung by their wrists from hooks while Zyklon-B gas was pumped into the room. Many of the victims were destined for the autopsy tables of Strasbourg University, where Dr August Hirt had amassed a collection of Jewish skeletons in order to prove the inferiority of the Jewish race through anatomical study. Others, mostly Gypsies brought here from Auschwitz, were subjected to medical experiments within the camp.21

Notwithstanding the fog which rose around, I perceived the walls and roofs of the houses of Soissons, with a half-moon peering from behind them. I alighted, and, with a heart fully acknowledging the sublimity of nature, gazed upon the imposing scene. A grasshopper was chirping in the neighboring field; the trees by the road side were softly rustling; and I saw, with the mind's eye, Peace hovering over the plain, now solitary and tranquil, where Caesar had conquered, Clovis had exercised his authority, and where Napoleon had all but fallen. It shows that men — even Caesar, Clovis, and Napoleon — are only passing shadows; and that war is a fantasy which terminates with them; whilst God — and Nature, which comes from God — and Peace, which comes from Nature — are things of eternity.

Billy nods and turns to the window. He knows he will never see Faison again, but how can he know? How does anyone ever know anything—the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation. And yet he knows, at least he thinks he knows, he feels it seeded in the purest certainty of his grief as he finds his seat belt and snaps it shut, that snick like the final lock of a vast and complex system. He’s in. Bound for the war. Good-bye, good-bye, good night, I love you all. He sits back, closes his eyes, and tries to think about nothing as the limo takes them away.

People refer to the fog of war, and I am sure something similar applies to my situation. If I hadn't kept a running record of the days, weeks, and years, the fog would have swallowed too much of the story for me to provide a reliable account.

Gloom everywhere. Gloom up the Potomac; where it rolls among meadows no longer green, and by splendid country seats. Gloom down the Potomac where it washes the sides of huge war-ships. Gloom on the marshes, the fields, and the heights. Gloom settling steadily down over the sumptuous habitations of the rich, and creeping through the cellars of the poor. Gloom arresting the steps of chance-office seekers, and bewildering the heads of grave and reverend Senators; for with fog, and drizzle, and a sleety driving mist the night has come at least two hours before its time.

The seventeen Dauntlesses of Lieutenant Wally Short’s Bombing Five, which had circled around to take up a better initial diving position, followed about three minutes later. Plummeting toward the Shokaku at a 70-degree angle, they were harassed by Zeros and their windshields fogged over. Yet they somehow managed to plant two 1,000-pound bombs on the flight deck, one fore and one aft. The second was dropped by Lieutenant John J. Powers, who held his dive to below 1,000 feet before releasing. The low drop guaranteed that he would not survive—the explosion of his own bomb, on the starboard side abaft of the Shokaku’s island, engulfed his aircraft. It was virtually a suicide attack; Powers traded his life (and that of his rear-seat man) to remove the possibility of missing the target. He was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.

Another peak rises above you. High, elegant, it draws you, but looking down there is a forest blocking your path. The forest is dark, the way is rough; strange fogs confuse the trees; you hear growls on one side, howls on the other. It is a fearful route but, for the bold adventurer, this makes it all the more imperative to find a way through. Not just for the high peak that waits on the other side, but the forest itself contains infinite riches of beauty. If I may, I would like to look at a part of our history as just such a journey. The Han Dynasty and Tang Dynasty are plainly commanding heights in our history. They were such powerful empires and cultures that I sometimes like to refer to all of Chinese civilization as Han-Tang culture. But we must not forget that between the high points of the Han and the Tang, there was a deep thicket of history: the wars of the Three Kingdoms, the brief and troubled Jin Dynasties, and the divided China of the Northern and Southern Dynasties. Within this dark forest, there was no certainty, no single universe under watchful skies. There was no unity of vision: Everywhere was chaos and conflict; every moment was flight and death. Conspiracies sprouted in all corners. The names we know from that time trailed drama in their wake, but all the chaos, all the disruption did not douse the human spirit.

Grant exhibited another serious defect in managing appointments. In the fast-moving world of warfare, it was a virtue to act decisively and make snap judgements based on intuition. In the White House, by contrast, he was too quick to hire people, then too quick to fire them. If this style served Grant well in the fog of war, where improvisation was vital, it led to some rough clashes and bruised feeling in the political sphere. Instead of seeming simple and direct, he could come across as brusque and even insensitive. When he should have deliberated and calculated, he sometimes rushed into headlong action, as if storming an enemy fort. p636

The airport reminded Leamas of the war: machines, half hidden in the fog, waiting patiently for their masters; the resonant voices and their echoes, the sudden shout and the incongruous clip of a girl’s heels on a stone floor; the roar of an engine that might have been at your elbow.

The struggle for power conducted along logical lines is much more likely to occur in smoke-filled rooms than at the polls. The party system is a grid, a filter, a meat chopper, through which issues are processed for the consuming public. The Civil War confirmed our preference for this arrangement. We like the fog of politics, with the occasional drama of the flash of a lightning bolt that, happily, is usually nothing more than a near miss.

As a corollary, guerrillas deny all information of themselves to their enemy, who is enveloped in an impenetrable fog. Total inability to get information was a constant complaint of the Nationalists during the first four Suppression Campaigns, as it was later of the Japanese in China and of the French in both Indochina and Algeria. This is a characteristic feature of all guerrilla wars, The enemy stands as on a lighted stage; from the darkness around him, thousands of unseen eyes intently study his every move, his every gesture. When he strikes out, he hits the air; his antagonists are insubstantial, as intangible as fleeting shadows in the moonlight.

And then came the war. That certainly raised the pressure from the personal front. It also brought relief for all the Progressives. They had been against war. It was part of the new creed that war was simply due to sex-repression. Sex, being unrepressed by Progressives, they naturally maintained that they had debunked war and they dismissed it with a laugh. But this war was different. It was present, pressing. The enemy was obviously suffering frightfully from sex-repression. The free, unrepressed peoples must unite now to oppose and end this sex-repression. So the Progressives found themselves freed from their awkward loyalty to peace, which, anyhow, was only a by-product of being unrepressed. After all, if little Alec is permitted to hit Susie on the head for fear he’d grow up repressed if he didn’t, surely if I have been repressed during childhood—not allowed to kick and bite father and mother—I had better get it out of my system now, especially when the enemy is so reactionary and would never permit children their charter right to kick their elders.

Machine learning also has a growing role on the battlefield. Learners can help dissipate the fog of war, sifting through reconnaissance imagery, processing after-action reports, and piecing together a picture of the situation for the commander. Learning powers the brains of military robots, helping them keep their bearings, adapt to the terrain, distinguish enemy vehicles from civilian ones, and home in on their targets. DARPA’s AlphaDog carries soldiers’ gear for them. Drones can fly autonomously with the help of learning algorithms; although they are still partly controlled by human pilots, the trend is for one pilot to oversee larger and larger swarms. In the army of the future, learners will greatly outnumber soldiers, saving countless lives.

When I rode along the Kinshasa Highway as a boy, it was a dusty, unpaved thread that wandered through the Rift Valley toward Lake Victoria, carrying not much traffic. It was a gravel road engraved with washboard bumps and broken by occasional pitlike ruts that could crack the frame of a Land Rover. As you drove along it, you would see in the distance a plume of dust growing larger, coming toward you: an automobile. You would move to the shoulder and slow down, and as the car approached, you would place both hands upon the windshield to keep it from shattering if a pebble thrown up by the passing car hit the glass. The car would thunder past, leaving you blinded in yellow fog. Now the road was paved and had a stripe painted down the center, and it carried a continual flow of vehicles. The overlanders were mixed up with pickup trucks and vans jammed with people, and the road reeked of diesel smoke. The paving of the Kinshasa Highway affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War. In effect, I had witnessed a crucial event in the emergence of AIDS, the transformation of a thread of dirt into a ribbon of tar.