The Wars

The Wars is a 1977 novel by Timothy Findley that tells the story of a young Canadian officer in World War I. Nineteen-year-old Robert Ross tries to escape both his grief over his sister's death and the social norms of oppressive Victorian upper-class society by enlisting in the Great War. He is quickly drawn into the madness of war and commits "a last desperate act to declare his commitment to life in the midst of death." Years later, a historian tries to piece together how he came to commit this act, using a mixture of styles and sources.

The novel was first published by Clarke Irwin. It won the Governor General's Award for fiction in 1977.

Style

The Wars utilizes first-, second-, and third-person narrative, which is very rare in literature. The narrative moves between voices, each telling part of Robert's story.

The novel is also an example of historiographic metafiction.

Plot summary

Prologue

A young man named Robert Ross is introduced as squatting in a tattered Canadian military uniform, with a pistol in hand. A nearby building is on fire, and a train is stopped. There is evidence of war, and Ross is shown to be in the company of a black horse and a dog. Robert, the horse, and the dog seem to have been together for a while, as they understand each other. He decides to free a herd of horses from the train, and the prologue ends with the horses, rider, and dog all running as a herd.

War

War is a state of armed conflict between societies. It is generally characterized by extreme collective aggression, destruction, and usually high mortality. The set of techniques and actions used to conduct war is known as warfare. An absence of war is usually called "peace". Total war is warfare that is not restricted to purely legitimate military targets, and can result in massive civilian or other non-combatant casualties.

While some scholars see war as a universal and ancestral aspect of human nature, others argue that it is only a result of specific socio-cultural or ecological circumstances.

In 2013 war resulted in 31,000 deaths down from 72,000 deaths in 1990. The deadliest war in history, in terms of the cumulative number of deaths since its start, is the Second World War, from 1939 to 1945, with 60–85 million deaths, followed by the Mongol conquests which was greater than 41 million. Proportionally speaking, the most destructive war in modern history is the War of the Triple Alliance, which took the lives of over 60% of Paraguay's population, according to Steven Pinker. In 2003, Richard Smalley identified war as the sixth (of ten) biggest problem facing humanity for the next fifty years. War usually results in significant deterioration of infrastructure and the ecosystem, a decrease in social spending, famine, large-scale emigration from the war zone, and often the mistreatment of prisoners of war or civilians. Another byproduct of some wars is the prevalence of propaganda by some or all parties in the conflict, and increased revenues by weapons manufacturers.

Wars (series)

The Wars series, also known as Famicom Wars (ファミコンウォーズ, Famikon Wōzu) in Japan, Advance Wars in the West, and occasionally Nintendo Wars as a whole, is a series of military turn-based tactics video games, usually developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo. The series debuted in Japan on August 12, 1988. Like another Intelligent Systems series, Fire Emblem, earlier installments of the series were released only in Japan; Advance Wars (2001) was the first to reach the North American and European markets. Advance Wars was released in the USA on September 10, 2001, but put on hold in Japan and Europe due to the subsequent terrorist attacks in the USA. Although released in Europe in January 2002, neither GBA game was released in Japan until the Game Boy Wars Advance 1+2 compilation which released for the Game Boy Advance on November 25, 2004 and for the Wii U Virtual Console on April 3, 2014.

In 2005, Advance Wars: Dual Strike was released on the Nintendo DS platform, which follows the basic form of its predecessors. That same year Battalion Wars, developed by Kuju Entertainment, was released for the Nintendo GameCube in Japan under the title "Totsugeki!! Famicom Wars", where it is considered a spin-off from the main series. Battalion Wars is a 3D action real-time strategy game, as opposed to the turn-based strategy of the main series.

Wars (album)

Wars is the third album from American hardcore group XBXRX, released in April 2007 on Polyvinyl Records.

Track listing

All songs by XBXRX

References