Whenever I read particularly well written and intense war stories, fictional or otherwise, my mind always drifts back to Ovid's Metamorphoses, as translated by Rolfe Humphries. Nobody has better put what it means when hell is brought to earth. And what it does to people.
The Iron Age succeeded, whose base vein
Let loose all evil: modesty and truth
And righteousness fled earth, and in their place
Came trickery and slyness, plotting, swindling,
Violence and the damned desire of having.
Men spread their sails to winds unknown to sailors,
The pines came down their mountain-sides, to revel
And leap in the deep waters, and the ground,
Free, once, to everyone, like air and sunshine,
Was stepped off by surveyors. The rich earth,
Good giver of all the bounty of the harvest,
Was asked for more; they dug into her vitals,
Pried out the wealth a kinder lord had hidden
In Stygian shadow, all that precious metal,
The root of evil. They found the guilt of iron,
And gold, more guilty still. And War came forth
That uses both to fight with; bloody hands
Brandished the clashing weapons. Men lived on plunder.
Guest was not safe from host, nor brother from brother,
A man would kill his wife, a wife her husband,
Stepmothers, dire and dreadful, stirred their brews
With poisonous aconite, and sons would hustle
Fathers to death, and Piety lay vanquished,
And the maiden Justice, last of all immortals,
Fled from the bloody earth.
It's simple language. But maybe that's the only way to do it. The only way to describe the total breakdown of society and justice is by describing what happens in plain language. You can call it hell - the absence of the light of god - and that's technically accurate. If god is to be found anywhere at all, it's certainly not there. But I think that calling it hell leaves too much up to the imagination. Most simply can't imagine how awful it is until they're given a glimpse into that pit. And when they get that glimpse, they're so surprised, disgusted, and horrified because the capacities for violence and cruelty which exist within the average person defy the imagination of somebody who has never been forced to confront them. It's why I value well told, well researched stories like this. We're better for having engaged with it.
And that is my half asleep post-work 2AM rant. Thank you.