A Thousand Ships

by Natalie Haynes

Men’s deaths are epic, women’s deaths are tragic:

War is not a sport, to be decided in a quick bout on a strip of contested land. It is a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself.

But this is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men – and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all.

But no one sings of the courage required by those of us who were left behind.

He is learning that in any war, the victors may be destroyed as completely as the vanquished. They still have their lives, but they have given up everything else in order to keep them. They sacrifice what they do not realize they have until they have lost it.

And so the man who can win the war can only rarely survive the peace.

A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches.