The Warm Hands of Ghosts

by Katherine Arden

Armageddon was a fire in the harbor, a box delivered on a cold day. It wasn’t one great tragedy, but ten million tiny ones, and everyone faced theirs alone.

In a way, it’s easier to imagine the world’s going to end. At least there’s a certainty to it. End—bam—done. But change—where does change stop?”

Freddie’s eyes never left Faland’s face. “Because out there you can give up every piece of yourself for nothing, let the mud swallow you, nameless and naked, or you can sell yourself to me, story by story, for all the delights of peace. There are two evils”—his voice turned wry—“and I am the lesser.

Ghosts have warm hands, he kept telling me, as though it were the greatest secret in the world.

It was the poet’s alchemy, to seize the intangible or unspeakable and drag it, real, into the living world.

It was so much easier to hate a man than a system: vast, inhuman, bloodstained.

We won, screamed the people outside. Don’t they know, Laura thought, we all lost? But it was over. The fighting would stop. The killing would stop. And perhaps the world had learned. Perhaps this was the war that would end war. Perhaps. For long minutes, no one spoke.

It was a time of shocking juxtapositions. Artillery could kill from seventy-five miles away, yet armies still communicated via messenger pigeon. Suits of armor went up against machine guns. Cavalry charged at tanks. Combat nurses wore corsets and carried gas masks. Primitive hand-to-hand combat with bayonets and trench knives alternated with precisely calibrated artillery barrages, and, famously, generals ran the war from luxurious French châteaux while their men, a scant few miles away, slept in wet, corpse-ridden trenches.

in The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien based his descriptions of Mordor and its neighboring lands on his wartime experiences. The unforgettable descriptions of Frodo and Sam crossing an alien landscape of slag heaps and smoking pits, with any water they can find burning their mouths—Tolkien didn’t imagine that. He lived it.

Europeans in 1914, rich with plundered colonial wealth, believing wholly in their cultural supremacy, discovered that they were capable of sending their children off to live in holes and murder each other. That knowledge stayed with the survivors all their lives.

considered the war through an apocalyptic lens, and in doing so I kept returning to this biblical quote: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.” The question I would have asked this long-ago prophet is: “Did you see a new hell too?” Because humanity did.