When barbarity replaced civility

Diana Preston’s ‘A Higher Form of Killing’ connects the events that led to changing the face of what the world knew as civilised war

Diana Preston, the historian, story-teller and the partner in the Alex Rutherford duo, has authored several acclaimed books of narrative history. Among the many in her kitty, was her book ‘Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy’ – the story of a passenger Ocean line, RMS Lusitania that was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the course of the submarine warfare during the World War I.

The vessel went down taking along with it 1,198 civilians and it is deemed as a course changing event that made the US join the war and the eventual German defeat. The book became a best seller and set the course for the next one in Diana’s stable – ‘A Higher Form of Killing’ early this year.

According to her, it was the First World War that gave birth to newer weapons of mass destruction – be it the poison gas, the torpedo, the zeppelin – that would change the way the wars would be fought in future.

“Technology was used increasingly to kill more and more people for the first time. This was done to creative massive psychological terror than anything else,” shares Diana Preston. She spoke about her book that was an evident outcome of all her findings during the writing of ‘Lusitania’ in an exclusive interview while on a recent visit to India.

Germany that until then was following the rules agreed to at the Hague Conventions of 1898 and 1907 deliberately breached them. The countries that resented and voiced their protest over the brutality of it all only joined in the race, eventually. “I was trying to understand the motivation behind the attacks and if the perpetrators would feel any guilt.

I tried hard to get inside their heads. I wanted to know what the scientist who developed chlorine gas felt like,” she adds. Most of the research for the book was already in place, thanks to her earlier works. “I am amazed at how much people remembered. There was also so much material existing – memories of people living, accounts of the dead, some beyond comprehension, and some rich in detail.”

The book tries to connect the various events during World War I that are much relevant in the current times of terror, and the lessons are never learnt. As she writes in the book – A 2013 article in the Wall Street Journal about the civil war in Syria headlined ‘Syria’s Gas Attack on Civilisation’ affirmed that “it takes a barbarian to employ poison gas”. It could have been written in 1915 with the simple substitution of ‘Germany’ for ‘Syria’.

By: Rajeshwari Kalyanam