In September 2022, a few days after Russian forces retreated from the Ukrainian town of Izium, I was standing outside an apartment block that had been split apart by a missile. Fifty-four residents had been killed in the Russian attack, which had taken place six months earlier. Purple and yellow wild flowers were growing in the rubble that filled the chasm between the two parts of the block.
“It is not the houses. It is the space between the houses,” I thought. “It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.” The words of James Fenton’s 1981 poem A German Requiem, about selective memory in the second world war, came to me when I could no longer find my own.
Back at my hotel in Kharkiv, I looked it up.
It is not your memories which haunt you.
It is not what you have written down.
It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.
What you must go on forgetting all your life.
The idea that the spaces between the houses symbolised gaps in memory, and that forgetting might be essential if people were to live together in peace, encapsulated the future facing the Ukrainians I had met that day. After the attack on the apartment block, the Russians had driven out the Ukrainian army, and Izium endured six terrible, violent months of Russian occupation. A young couple told me that now the Ukrainian authorities were back, they planned to denounce their neighbours for collaboration with the occupiers. I couldn’t know if the neighbours really had collaborated with the Russians, or just done what they deemed necessary to survive. Either way, war had brought bitterness and enmity in its wake. Just like those in Fenton’s poem, from now on people’s lives in Izium would be polluted by suspicion, by the mistrustful look and the whispered word behind the hand.
It is not what he wants to know.
It is what he wants not to know.
It is not what they say.
It is what they do not say.
My TV news report reflected some of this, but it did not have the allusive power of the poem.
In my nearly four decades as a foreign correspondent, I have always carried a book of poetry with me. While the images we show have great impact, I feel that journalistic language sometimes fails to convey the intensity of the experience. Maybe Fenton’s poetry resonates with me because he was a war correspondent as well as a poet – he sees what I see but has found a more compelling way of expressing it, as if he is working in three dimensions while I am stuck in two. We journalists pride ourselves on the clarity of our prose and on making complex stories simple. That’s our job – to explain why terrible things are happening and to challenge the euphemisms used by politicians and military spokespeople. We also try to convey the thoughts and feelings of the people we meet, and a sense of what it feels like to be on the ground. Yet we may lose the deeper meaning, the universal import of what we have witnessed or the contradictory emotions that war engenders.
Sometimes poetry can serve as a vaccination against despair. On 7 October 2023, militants from the Palestinian group Hamas breached the high-tech fence separating Gaza from Israel and went on a rampage of killing, rape and abduction. It was the single worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Israel proceeded to bomb Gaza relentlessly, destroying homes, killing tens of thousands of civilians and depriving all Gazans of food, water and other basic necessities. The Israel Defense Forces invaded in tanks and armoured vehicles, fighting Hamas, which operated out of tunnels.
The Israeli government told Gazans to flee to the south of the strip, which would be safe. It wasn’t – people were killed when bombs hit their tented camps. Many families were forced to flee multiple times – nowhere was safe. Even the dead could not rest in peace, as tanks ploughed up graveyards.
Day after day, Gazan journalists filmed terrible scenes of injured children, whimpering in overcrowded hospital corridors, sometimes unaware that their parents had been killed. Whatever and however we reported, journalists came under heavy criticism, accused of bias towards one side or the other, depending on the political orientation of the accuser. Stoked by social media, antisemitism and Islamophobia surged across the world; everybody, it seemed, wanted to pick a side and deny the humanity of the other, to demand a monopoly on suffering. Slogans and propaganda are anathema to good journalism, as they are to good poetry.
I turned to the most famous Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, whose work expresses the anger and yearning of those living under occupation and bombardment, who gain strength from their ancestors’ long history.
“I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey,” he wrote in his poem I Belong There. Then I sought out his Israeli counterpart, Yehuda Amichai, who understood that self-righteous fury rarely leads to peace.
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.
The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.
Poets don’t have the answers. But they may help us understand our own actions and reactions and find a way through the darkness.
The lives of those who have had war visited upon them, including children, conscripts and civilians, are desperate and miserable. But those who have chosen to visit war – aid workers, journalists, military volunteers – share a secret. War gives your life purpose and meaning. Suddenly you believe you know what matters and what can be dismissed as unimportant. The colours are brighter and the mountains clearer. You live in the moment. There’s a wonderful camaraderie with others going through the same experience, and surviving a near miss gives you a heady rush of adrenaline. Shared fear turns to laughter, which no one outside the group can understand. When you go home, or the war ends, you have to return to the humdrum reality of paying the bills and arguing about who takes out the rubbish. Even those who protest against war far from the frontline may get caught up in the thrill of the cause and miss that feeling of urgency when it falls away.
As a servant suggests in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, not everyone hates war:
Let me have a war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mull’d, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war is a destroyer of men.
(Act IV, Scene V)
* * *
I came to war reporting reluctantly, having started my career in the late 1970s as a volunteer aid worker in Central America. If I’m honest, I didn’t really know that war was brewing across the region – my concern was social justice, and, at 20 years old, I just wanted to have an adventure and change the world. (I succeeded in the former but not – needless to say – in the latter.) In 1982, I moved to Kenya to work for the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund, Unicef.
A few years later, when I realised that – having no expertise in anything practical, such as public health or agriculture – I was not much use as an aid worker, I pivoted to journalism, which required only the few skills I had, namely the ability to read, write and ask questions. Still, I tried to avoid war, thinking, somewhat piously, that I should be covering poverty and development.
Reality overcame the illusions I harboured. Nearly every country neighbouring Kenya – Uganda, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia – was going through civil war. I couldn’t avoid it. And I found that while reporting on people in war zones was at times upsetting and occasionally terrifying, it was also rewarding and exciting. I felt that I was living through history as it happened. Later, I was lucky enough to get a job with Channel 4 News, based in London, and while I have never been exclusively a war correspondent, I have spent a lot of my career reporting conflict.
Covering war can be addictive; a colleague who has since weaned himself off it titled his memoir War Junkie. My friend Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times correspondent who was killed in Syria in 2012, was another addict. After she was shot crossing a frontline in Sri Lanka and lost her sight in one eye, she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She received psychiatric treatment, recovered and promptly went back to war.
“Anyway,” she shrugged, “it’s what we do.”
In recent years there’s been more acknowledgment that PTSD is an occupational hazard for journalists who cover war, especially for prolonged periods. At first the research concentrated on western journalists, but now it’s recognised that those who report their own country descending into conflict may be more vulnerable, not least because they have family responsibilities and can’t just leave if it gets too dangerous.
Despite all this, many journalists are resilient, and – at least for now – I would count myself as fortunate in this regard. Witnessing the suffering of others, surviving danger and experiencing grief are all profound experiences, to which nightmares, anger, tears and bouts of despondency are all normal, human responses. They are not necessarily signs of a clinical condition.
Pain and trauma are not the same. In February 1994, during a hiatus in my journalistic career, I went to work for Unicef again, this time in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. It was a time of foreboding and sporadic violence, but I had no concept of what was to come: you can’t prepare for the unimaginable.
Two months to the day after I had arrived, a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi was shot out of the sky. Almost immediately, men with machetes and nail-studded clubs were out building roadblocks. It was the start of a genocide, in which some 800,000 ethnic Tutsis were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbours and Hutu militia.
In those terrifying first few days I was the only foreign correspondent on the streets of Kigali. The terrible things I saw have stayed with me all my life. In the years that followed, I used to feel that I needed philosophical more than psychological help – after seeing what they are capable of, it is hard to believe that human beings are inherently good. As time went by, I found solace in poetry, which provided both a connection and a way of distancing myself from what I had witnessed. Connection because a poet might express similar emotions to my own, and distance because a poem could transform the singularity of my experience into something universal.
The dominance of the Great War soldier-poets – Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg – in British culture and education may lead to the assumption that war poetry is a male preserve, and that western poets have a monopoly on the form. This is far from the case. The first known war poet was a Sumerian high priestess, Enheduanna, who lived in Ur, in what is now southern Iraq, in about 2300BC. Contemporary poetry, much of it written by women, reflects the fact that modern conflicts tend to kill more civilians than soldiers. The late Irish musician Frank Harte said: “Those in power write the history; those who suffer write the songs.” A lot of songs and poems have been written in recent years, including by children, such as 13-year-old Amineh Abou Kerech, whose family fled Syria and ended up in Oxford:
Can anyone teach me
how to make a homeland?
Heartfelt thanks if you can,
heartiest thanks,
from the house-sparrows,
the apple-trees of Syria,
and yours very sincerely.
Viewers who have watched the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine and the Middle East unfold on TV have told me they struggle to find the words to express their concern, fear and compassion. As conflicts proliferate, they feel as the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova did in 1919, contemplating the wreckage left by the Great War and the Russian Revolution:
Why is this century worse than those that have gone before?
In a stupor of sorrow and grief
it located the blackest wound
but somehow couldn’t heal it.
Already overwhelmed by despair, Akhmatova had yet to face the second world war and Stalin’s persecutions, both of which she survived. Her era was indeed among the worst in history. In the second part of the 20th century, western Europeans and North Americans grew to believe that peace and prosperity were normal, that war was something that happened to other people elsewhere in the world. Now, many feel a sense of dread. History puts our era in perspective, as well as serving as a warning. Poetry helps us see parallels with the past, and puts up a mirror to our fears.
Back in the 1860s, during the American civil war, Emily Dickinson wrote that poets can tell the truth in a more subtle, and sometimes more effective, way:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
In assembling his perennially popular anthology Other Men’s Flowers, Field Marshal Lord Wavell, who commanded British forces in the Middle East in the second world war, used the criteria that he should know each poem by heart – all 256 of them. I cannot claim such feats of memory. Some of the poems that bring me solace I have known and loved for years, and others I have only recently discovered. Poetry, like most things, goes in fashions.
Lord Wavell favoured iambic pentameter, strict rhyme and a patriotic spirit; I prefer free verse and a more ambiguous and reflective approach. I am drawn to what Wilfred Owen described as: “The pity of war, the pity war distilled.”
Colvin believed in the power of journalism to “make a difference”. Being unable to point to an occasion when my own reporting has altered the course of history, I am less ambitious. Still, I believe it’s important for journalists, using whatever tools we have, to counter the lies that are always told in times of war and – as far as we can – show the truth of what is happening. It matters not least because more war is coming: the conflicts and refugee flows caused by climate change are only just starting, while western societies are riven by polarising political discourse that threatens to spill over into more violence. Artificial intelligence has a terrifying potential to disassociate further those who make the decision to kill from those who are killed, and enable propagandists to fake images. It’s our job to sound warnings and cut through dangerous rhetoric. Even if our reporting changes nothing, when it’s over, politicians should not be able to say that they didn’t know. They knew because we told them.
On the whole, though, journalism is ephemeral. We rarely read the stories written by reporters who covered the first and second world wars. We do, of course, read the poetry. So, I suspect, will it be today. Journalists focus on what is critical now – this village taken, that truce broken, a new atrocity by occupying forces. But poets through the ages have turned the horror of war into transcendent works of beauty and meaning.
Journalism is of the moment. But poetry lasts for ever.
• This is an extract from I Brought the War with Me by Lindsey Hilsum, which is published by Chatto & Windus on 19 September (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order a copy from guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Lindsey will be reading from her book at the Southbank Centre’s London Literature festival on 26 October. Tickets from £15, southbankcentre.co.uk
