...ire quadrato agmine exercitum, ubi hostis ab omni parte suspectus est, pugnae paratum. 'Idem' inquit 'sapiens facere debet: omnis virtutes suas undique expandat...' Sapiens autem, ad omnem incursum munitus, intentus, non si paupertas, non si luctus, non si ignominia, non si dolor impetum faciat, pedem referet: interritus et contra illa ibit et inter illa.
...an army marching in hollow square, in a place where the enemy might be expected to appear from any quarter, ready for battle. "This," said he, "is just what the wise man ought to do; he should have all his fighting qualities deployed on every side..." But the wise man is fortified against all inroads; he is alert; he will not retreat before the attack of poverty, or of sorrow, or of disgrace, or of pain. He will walk undaunted both against them and among them.
— Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter VII
This is our sixth visit to the archive. Half of my notebook is covered with writing, bookmarks of the entire rainbow spectrum stick out at the corners of the pages. Instead of sheets of documents, there are at least eight open books on the table, and we do the 'circle dance' around them, taking notes from each book. The professor even brought a huge piece of whatman paper, which we spread out on the next table, and drew a chronological line as well as additional graphs to compare very interesting facts that I managed to accidentally discover on the Internet.
"It was the best ten dollars I've spent in my life." I translate the text from the screen of the librarian's laptop and copy it onto a whatman.
In the entire archive, we could not find summaries of the attacks on our troops by the enemy. Desperate, I started looking for something on the Internet, and came across the online archive of the library of Nobilica, the country that attacked Cordia. After paying for an online subscription, I stayed in their archives for the whole weekend, in particular due to the fact that all the documents were obviously in Nobilian, and required translation. However, my project abruptly turned from telling the story of one day into exposing military plans.
We both step away from whatman and look at a comparative analysis of attacks, wins and losses. Attacks from Nobilica troops are listed on the left, and the Steel Legion on the right. Everything is in chronological order, date to date. For the former, the list takes up one column and for the Legion, we've already filled almost three full columns. It was as if they were at war with themselves and not with Nobilica. They didn't even have as many men in the army as indicated in the Legion's reports.
Professor Anderson studies the records and comments, "The Legion's forces were many times superior to the Nobilicans. Nobilica's army was less equipped with weaponry. Cordia even had a defense plan that they had successfully used from the very first days.
I enter the last digit into the calculator to see the difference: the documented attacks and the number of casualties from the Cordia side, indicated by Nobilica, and the number for the same period, indicated by the Steel Legion. I freeze.
Monsters.
"In the first year of the war, more than..." I exhale heavily, "Ninety thousand people died under mysterious circumstances."
The professor looks at me full of fear and I look at him with pain, feeling damn guilty again. It will take a long time for me to get used to the fact that revealed secrets are not the fault of the one who revealed them, but of those who committed crimes and hid them from the public.
"These are not just war crimes, isolated attacks on the squads of those who helped us in the confrontation." The professor goes into a whisper. "These numbers suggest that such attacks were a widespread practice."
YOU ARE READING
Astar
ParanormalHow often do you find out about military secrets by accident? In pursuit of a prestigious education, Florence uncovers the terrible secret of the murder of her relative. But it is not so easy to convict and punish the culprit when it is the governme...
