I served under Captain Vane for fourteen months, during which time I learned that the men who are described as brilliant in the official dispatches are, in person, unbearable.

It was not that he was cruel. Cruelty at least implies a relationship with the world, however distorted. Vane was simply indifferent, and his indifference was so complete that it bent the lives of everyone around him like branches in a storm that the weather bureau never reported.

I was his adjutant, which meant that I translated his brilliance into paperwork. Orders became dispatches, dispatches became reports, and reports became the kind of document that, when printed and bound, made the whole enterprise look like civilization rather than what it was: a group of men in uniforms deciding which other men in different uniforms should die, and why.

The first time I saw him give an order that I knew, in my body, would result in deaths, I asked him for clarification. Not challenge—I was not brave enough for that. Clarification, because I thought that if I could just understand the logic, the moral weight would become distributed in a way that was bearable.

He looked at me with the same expression he would have given a weather report. “You don’t need to understand it,” he said. “You need to file it.”

I filed it. The men went. The reports came back. The dispatches were brilliant.

I began to notice things. Small things, at first. The way Vane’s handwriting changed when he was tired—not worse, exactly, but different, as though the hand belonged to someone else. The way he would sometimes stare at the map for long periods, not reading it but something behind it. The way he never ate with the other officers, always in his quarters, always alone.

One evening, drunk on something that was meant to be medicinal and was not, I asked him what he saw on the map.

“Not what,” he said. “Who.”

“Who?”

“The man who will write the history of this war,” he said. “He is sitting in a room in London, and he is already lying.”

I laughed. He did not.

The last order I filed for Captain Vane was written on paper that was slightly damp, as though he had handled it in the rain or with wet hands. It ordered a retreat that was not a retreat but a repositioning, though everyone who received it understood that it meant abandoning positions that had taken three years to take and a thousand men to hold.

I filed it. The men came back. Some of them didn’t come back at all.

I left the army six months later. I wrote a book about my time under Captain Vane. I tried to be honest. I failed. The book was described as brilliant. I know now why.

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