“As applied to the United States, small wars are operations undertaken under executive authority, wherein military force is combined with diplomatic pressure in the internal or external affairs of another state whose government is unstable, inadequate, or unsatisfactory for the preservation of life and of such interests as are determined by the foreign policy of our Nation.” Small Wars Manual, United States Marine Corps, 1940
It is such a conflict, and its outsized personal cost, that Sadie Jones explores in her second novel, “Small Wars.”
A young major, his wife and twin daughters. Cyprus and Great Britain, 1956. The collision is a confrontation that is without honor and seemingly without redemption.
Maj. Hal Trehearne, 30, looks to have a brilliant military career ahead of him. Educated at Sandhurst, Britain’s equivalent of West Point, he is posted to Cyprus in 1956. There he is part of the British forces battling the enosis movement, an attempt by Greek Cypriots to overthrow British colonial rule and join the island with Greece. (“Enosis” is the Greek word for “union.”) Not all Cypriots are sympathetic to the EOKA resistance organization; the island has a sizable Turkish population.
There had already been anti-British violence when Clara and the toddlers met Hal in the coastal town of Limassol. At first, there was no housing for the family at the Episkopi Garrison; they are forced to live in more dangerous surroundings in the city.
Hal is called out one night to help restore order after a terrorist bombing at a nearby police station. Clara is left alone with the girls, coming to terms with their tenuous safety: “She left the kitchen and went up to sit on the bed, with the girls sleeping, tucking her legs under her and wrapping her arms around her knees. The house was empty and evil around her, hiding itself, no protection from anything that might come. It was a nothing house; she couldn’t hope to be all right in it.”
Moving to Episkopi brings an illusion of safety, until a land mine explodes on the beach near their home.
Both sides are playing for keeps, something Hal understands instinctively, at least at first. For Clara it’s a different matter. The violence simmering close to the surface is a new kind of daily reality with which she cannot easily cope.
But the way the conflict is being waged begins to wear at Hal, albeit in a different way. He had thought of war as some kind of clean thing; when he first sees the torture of a captured terrorist, he dismisses it: “It isn’t an extreme method of interrogation to nearly drown a man when you’re saving lives.”
The EOKA campaign, which started as a desire for independence, becomes a terrorist campaign, “and the British government, having missed the opportunity to negotiate early on, was backed into a corner.”
Small doubts begin to snowball. Blind retribution for terrorist attacks is leveled at civilians, and Hal attempts to stand in the way of a force larger than him.
The question at the center of “Small Wars” is whether a man can survive his compromised beliefs. It would seem that some can, or perhaps for some the belief that the end justifies the means stands above any other moral code.
The right way is neither clear nor easy, and without a rudder, Hal has nothing. He cannot be true to either his career or his marriage.
“Small Wars” is a narrative that manages to be both rich and sparse. The prose is straightforward, with just enough carefully selected detail to breathe vividness into the work. Jones shifts her narrative between the worlds of Clara and Hal, which serves to heighten the tension as the civil and marital unrest escalates.
In what reads as a quiet, calm work, she captures the essence of dehumanized warfare and renders inescapable parallels in a more modern world.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who lives in Centennial.
FICTION
Small Wars
by Sadie Jones, $24.99
