The Prisoners’ Wall - b y Sam Hollands Introduction There had been war for nearly two thousand years. As well as three major continental wars there had been countless civil wars, land wars, sea wars, the war of vanity, and the prolonged and terrifying war of technology. The psychological dissonance of conflict had crept with varying degrees of subtlety into every home. War constituted the strongest thread of meaning for two thousand years. One of the poets of this world had described these two millennia as a “love affair with mortality” and the people loved him for pulling off that age-old trick of supplying a glib phrase to allow everyone to be wry and wise about something truly and incomprehensibly terrible. Then mankind achieved peace. Worldwide unity of purpose, an end to the unsightly carnage that had been their heritage for so many jarring years. It had begun with a piece of legislation called “The Universal Bill of Conservation” which...
