Five Ways to Win a War, Five Ways to Lose One

It is difficult these days to understand what war actually is.

One hears of drones hovering above deserts and cities, of cyber-attacks that paralyze hospitals and power grids, of missiles launched from thousands of miles away by operators who may never see the faces of the people beneath them. The language has become strangely antiseptic: precision strike, surgical operation, collateral damage.

And yet the images remain stubbornly human.

Children pulled from rubble.
Mothers running through smoke.
Men staring at the sky, unsure whether the buzzing overhead is a machine or fate - wounds that someone later will try to repair.

In moments like these, an old poem returns to me, one I first encountered as a boy.

Edwin Brock’s “Five Ways to Kill a Man.”

The poem is brief. Almost unsettlingly so. Its logic is ruthless in its simplicity. Brock begins with the ancient method: you make a man carry wood up a hill and nail him to it. From there he moves through history, through crusades and wars, through increasingly efficient ways of killing.

And then comes the line that stayed with me all these years.

You leave a man in the middle of the twentieth century.

The poem suggests that once a man is placed there, history itself will take care of the rest.

I was about fourteen or fifteen when we read it.

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The classroom was small, ordinary, and full of the predictable sociology of teenagers. The boys mostly snickered their way through English literature, treating poetry as an unfortunate interruption between cricket matches and physics equations. The girls, generally speaking, listened with far greater patience.

I was somewhere in between.

I had recently transitioned from an Urdu-medium school. The shift felt seismic. The uniforms were different, the language was different, even the confidence of the students felt different. I was still trying to find my footing in English that sounded suspiciously like the Queen herself might appear any moment to correct our grammar.

Science, however, was safe territory.

I was a science nerd through and through.

Yet something about literature was beginning to open doors I did not know existed.

Our teacher had a way of making poems feel less like puzzles and more like windows. When we read Brock’s poem, she did something simple but unforgettable. She walked us through the deaths of men across history.

First Jesus.
Then soldiers of crusades and empires.
Then the trenches of the First World War.
Then the mechanized slaughter of the Second.

Finally, she spoke about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Two cities erased by men who never saw the faces of those they killed.

At the end of the poem Brock writes of the final method: a psychopath pressing a button and dropping an atomic bomb.

Even as teenagers we understood the brutality of that idea.

Killing had become efficient.

And strangely distant.

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Around those same years we watched Dead Poets Society in the school library during class hours.

John Keating stood on desks urging students to see the world differently. I remember watching the film with the vague sense that literature might actually matter - an unsettling idea for someone who was far more comfortable with electromagnetism than metaphors.

Ironically, electromagnetism nearly got me expelled from that very school.

One afternoon in the physics lab I brought in a homemade solenoid - an iron nail wrapped in copper wire. My grand ambition was to build a functioning electromagnet. The experiment refused to cooperate with the battery I had brought.

A more adventurous classmate solved the problem in the most direct way imaginable: he plugged the contraption into the mains.

For a brief moment sparks flew and we admired the spectacle like amateur scientists discovering electricity for the first time.

Then came the crackling sound.
Then the smoke.
Then the laboratory lights went out.

Shortly afterward the entire school was in darkness.

It did not take the administration long to trace the origin of this technological breakthrough. During the next class I was summoned to the principal’s office. I walked there convinced that my brief career at the school had ended abruptly.

On his desk sat the charred remains of my once-proud electromagnet.

“What happened?” he asked.

My vocabulary in moments of crisis has never been extensive.

“Uhh…”

Eventually the story emerged, minus a few details about who had actually committed the fatal act of plugging the device into the wall.

“It was all in the name of science,” I concluded, believing this to be a rather persuasive legal defense.

The principal looked at me silently.

And then he laughed.

Not the laughter of someone mocking stupidity, but the laughter of someone who recognized curiosity when he saw it.

He did not expel me.
Not then.
Not ever.

Years later, after I had somehow managed to secure the best grades in the class, he asked me a simple question as I stood in that same office.

“How do you feel?”

I answered with my usual eloquence.

“Uhh…”

“Humility,” he said.

At the time I did not fully understand what he meant.

I suspect I am still learning.

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Decades later the world appears to have perfected many of the efficiencies that the poem hinted at.

Wars continue, though they rarely resemble the ones described in history textbooks. Machines now hover above battlefields. Decisions travel through cables and satellites. A person may sit thousands of miles away and still determine who lives and who does not.

As a physician, I have spent much of my life trying to mend what violence does to the human body. Watching that violence become increasingly mechanized does little to resolve the moral discomfort.

Victory, increasingly, is measured in technical success.

History, however, has an odd habit of recording different outcomes. Those who once suffered oppression sometimes become powerful enough to inflict it. Those who speak of justice sometimes practice something closer to vengeance. Moral clarity rarely survives contact with power.

Standing here in the twenty-first century, one sometimes wonders whether the machinery of war has simply become more efficient at hiding the human hand behind it. Perhaps that efficiency is what we have come to call winning.

Looking back at those school years, what remains most vivid are not the wars of the twentieth century but the quieter figures who shaped our thinking about them.

There was a literature teacher who made poetry feel real.

There was a fictional English teacher who told students to stand on desks.

There was also a principal who chose laughter over punishment.

Strange how the things that stay with us are rarely the ones we expect.

A poem about killing.

A classroom full of teenagers pretending not to care.

Somewhere in the background, teachers quietly placing ideas in our heads - ideas that wait patiently for decades before returning, uninvited, when the world once again begins to resemble a poem we first read at fifteen.

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from Rambling of an Itinerant

Additional Reading:

1. https://anitinerantobserver.blogspot.com/2015/08/o-captain-my-captain-eulogy-and-epitaph.html

2. Mian A. Sir. From an Itinerant Observer. Acacia Publishing. 2014