Step Inside History

The morning began like any other — bread in the ovens, the smell of woodsmoke, the usual noise of the market. Then the mountain moved.

By the time the plague reached my street, I had already helped bury four neighbors. I had learned what the smell meant, and what the silence after it meant.

We had been awake for twenty-two hours when the 1202 alarm went off. In those four seconds before Gene Kranz spoke, I learned something about the difference between training and the real thing.

I was not a Spartan. I was a helot — property, not soldier. But I was there, carrying the dead and the dying, and I saw what three hundred men chose to do when the mountain showed them there was no other way out.

We had held the walls for a thousand years. The city had survived Persians, Arabs, Russians, Bulgars, and the crusaders we called brothers. That night, I understood it would not survive the morning.

The ship did not list at first. That was the strangest thing — you could not feel it going. You could only see the horizon tilting when you looked at the water, and even then it seemed like something that could be corrected.

By the second night, the fire had its own weather. The heat pushed back against the wind. Embers the size of a man's fist were landing in streets half a mile ahead of the flames. London was eating itself.

There was no sound. That was the first thing wrong — the light came and there was no sound with it, and then the sound arrived, and by then I was already on the ground and the city was already gone.

We had not eaten properly in two weeks. The bread I made was more chalk than flour, and I knew it, and the people who bought it knew it, and we all pretended otherwise. Then the news came about the king's troops, and the pretending stopped.

They say the Tigris ran black with ink for three days as the books were thrown in. I was there. I saw it. The river did not run black — it ran dark brown, and then it ran red, and then it was simply the river again, carrying everything away.

The ramp dropped and the men in front of me stepped into nothing. The water was chest-deep and the machine guns were already firing. I had trained for this for two years and none of the training prepared me for the sound.

Thucydides wrote it down. I lived it. He described the symptoms correctly — the burning in the throat, the sneezing, the black skin — but he could not describe what it felt like to watch a city that believed itself immortal discover that it was not.

Rome had not been taken by a foreign army in eight hundred years. We had grown up inside that fact the way you grow up inside the walls of a house — never thinking about the walls, never imagining what might be on the other side.

Everyone I knew had done the arithmetic. A man could make more in a week in California than in a year in Ohio. The arithmetic was correct. What the arithmetic did not include was everything else.

They called us liquidators. The word meant we were liquidating the consequences of the accident. No one told us, in those first weeks, what the consequences of liquidating the consequences would be.

The ration in November was 125 grams of bread per day. I weighed mine on the postal scale I kept for letters, every morning, to make sure I was not cheated. I was not cheated. 125 grams is the weight of a small fist.

We were in disguise, but not really. Everyone in Boston knew what was going to happen that night and who was going to do it. The disguise was the city's way of agreeing to pretend otherwise.

I counted the wounds afterward, because someone had to, and because counting is the only way a clerk knows to respond to a thing that is too large for words. There were twenty-three. The physicians said only one was fatal.

They asked me to hold the camera and press the lever when the machine lifted. I said I would, though I had never used a camera before. They said it was simple. It was simple. What was in the photograph when they developed it was not simple at all.

The ticker was running two hours behind by noon, which meant that men were selling stocks they did not know the price of, into a market they could not see, based on information that was already history. By the time you knew what something was worth, it was worth less.

We had charged English squares six times and broken none of them. The seventh time, the Emperor said, would be different. The Emperor was wrong.

At 7:28 AM the mines went off under Hawthorn Ridge. Two minutes later the whistles blew. We went over the top and into the worst single day in the history of the British Army.

When the girls began to convulse in the meetinghouse, I thought it was a fit. I did not imagine that the fit would become a rope.

We sent eight burning ships into the heart of the Armada at midnight. By morning, the greatest fleet ever assembled was in chaos, and England was saved.

For thirteen days the most powerful men in the world sat in a room and tried to prevent what no one wanted. We were closer than any of us admitted then, and some of us still do not admit it now.

The ship that was supposed to carry us across Antarctica became our home for ten months as the ice held it. Then the ice crushed it, and we had only the lifeboats and Shackleton's word that he would get us home.

The law was clear: no general could lead his army south of the Rubicon. Caesar stood on the north bank for an hour. Then he led us across, and Rome was never the same again.

I left on a Sunday night because that gave me until Tuesday before anyone would come looking. I walked by the North Star for eleven nights. I carried two things: a piece of bread and the name of a street.

The messenger reached us before they did. Strange men, he said, who had come from the sea — bearded, armored, with animals no one had seen before and weapons that made thunder. We had a name for them before we understood what they were.

On the day Romulus Augustus abdicated, the sun rose and set as it always had. The birds sang. The market opened. We had been the eternal empire, and now we were not, and the world kept turning.