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From the Ashes of History
 From the Ashes of History
Collective Trauma and the Making of International
Politics
ADAM B. LERNER
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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© Oxford University Press 2022
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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930623
ISBN 978–0–19–762359–6 (pbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–762358–9 (hbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–762361–9 (epub.)
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197623589.001.0001
 Contents

Acknowledgments

PART I. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

1. Collective Trauma and the Making of International Politics
2. Theorizing Collective Trauma
3. Collective Trauma and Identity: A Necessary Liaison

PART II. THREE EMPIRICAL CASES

4. Colonialism as Collective Trauma: Economic Nationalism and
Autarkic State-Building in India
5. Victimhood Nationalism in Israel: The Eichmann Trial’s Role in
Israeli Foreign Policy Discourse
6. Blurring the Boundaries of War: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
and the Collectivization of US Combat Trauma
7. Conclusion

References
Index
 Acknowledgments

This book represents the culmination of a multiyear journey across

continents and scholarly disciplines. I am thankful to have had
numerous guides and fellow travelers.
The research began in 2015 at the University of Cambridge.
During my MPhil and PhD research (2015–2019), I was lucky to
benefit from the mentorship of three fantastic scholars: Shailaja
Fennell, Duncan Bell, and Yale Ferguson. Their kindness, support,
and insight were paramount in formulating the ideas in this book,
and I am deeply grateful to each of them. I was also lucky at
Cambridge to meet three close friends working on related subjects:
Sean Fleming, Jaakko Heiskanen, and Lucas de Oliveira Paes. All of
them have become intellectual sparring partners and generously
provided feedback on multiple chapters. Additionally, I would like to
extend my thanks to Shama Ams, Anjali Bhardwaj-Datta, Joya
Chatterji, Lorena Gazzotti, Avneet Kaur, David Lowe, Giovanni
Mantilla, Jason Sharman, Ayse Zarakol, and Maja Spanu—all of
whom took part in this book’s ideation and refinement.
While doing archival research in India in 2018, I benefited from
the support of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s
India branch in Delhi, which provided research assistance during my
tenure as a visiting scholar. I further benefited from the friendship
and support of Satbir Bedi, Shashwat Silas, Sukrit Silas, and Neil
Noronha. I would also like to extend my thanks to Vinod Jose and
Hartosh Singh Bal, two mentors from my prior career as a journalist
who helped me navigate Delhi’s archives, libraries, and politics.
Once I began my appointment at Royal Holloway, University of
London, in 2019, this book benefited immensely from the support of
wonderful colleagues. In particular, I want to single out Laura
Sjoberg, who arrived at Royal Holloway after me but quickly became
an ideal mentor and confidant. She read book chapters, helped me
navigate revision and submission, and even provided vital good
humor and encouragement during the worst periods of lockdown. I
am similarly indebted to Ben O’Loughlin and Michelle Bentley—
friends and mentors who provided advice, support, and feedback. I
would also like to thank Antara Datta, Chris Hanretty, Sarah Childs,
Thomas Stubbs, Daniela Lai, Dishil Shrimankar, and Oliver Heath for
reading chapters of the manuscript and providing advice during its
revision. For engaging with my work remotely and offering
thoughtful feedback and guidance, I would like to thank Brent
Steele, Medha Kudaisya, Maria Mälksoo, Lene Hansen, Karin Fierke,
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, and Dovile Budryte. Paul Beaumont,
additionally, provided enormous help and good humor during the
final stages of revision.
During the publication process, I was lucky to receive the
guidance and wisdom of Oxford University Press’s senior editor
Angela Chnapko—a true champion of scholarly research. A thanks
are also due to the three anonymous reviewers whose detailed
comments helped improve the manuscript and see it across the
finish line. Portions of chapters 5 and 6 were previously published in
the European Journal of International Relations and Perspectives on
Politics, respectively, and I am grateful to both journals for granting
permission to adapt this work.
Finally, I am deeply indebted to my friends and family, scattered
across the globe, who have provided their support, encouragement,
and love throughout this process. In particular, I want to thank my
mom (Lisa Horowitz), my dad (Bruce Lerner), and my sister (Kira
Lerner), whose love and kindness kept me sane during a long and
difficult research process. Partway through this journey, I was lucky
to meet my partner, Allicen Dichiara, and adopt our dog, Moose—
they have since become my family. Once they entered the picture, I
couldn’t have imagined writing this book without them.
 PART I
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
 1
Collective Trauma and the Making of
International Politics

Introduction
The varied origin stories that international relations (IR) scholars
have proposed for their discipline all share one thing in common.
Whether they refer back to the Peace of Westphalia following the
Thirty Years’ War, the first “great debate” following World War I, or
even Thucydides’s early classical realist account of the
Peloponnesian War, they all envision the international political arena
as forged in the wake of mass violence. Even alternative, critical
accounts that locate IR’s roots in long-standing imperial hierarchies,
the international slave trade, or the twentieth century’s wave of
decolonization similarly implicate the structural violence of empire
and racism, as well as the often violent expulsion of foreign rulers.1
These mythologized origins allude to the pervasiveness of mass
violence in IR, with a role that extends well beyond inquiries into the
discipline’s roots. Many of the institutions that scholars of
international politics study—including the borders that define states,
the norms that delineate appropriate behavior, the organizations that
manage interstate relations, and even the ideational lines between
“us” and “them”—similarly emerged due to tremendous bloodshed
and oppression. Just as medicine tends to pay disproportionate
attention to diseases of the body, IR tends to focus on diseases of
world politics.
Yet despite the disproportionate attention mass violence receives,
IR scholarship has a problematic tendency to accept its
consequences at face value. Typically, scholars follow an implicit
“event” model of mass violence, based on linear, sequential timing2
and mechanistic notions of cause and effect. This model understands
violent episodes as having defined durations, beginning with
identifiable dawns and culminating in conclusive dusks. According to
such thinking, once a cataclysm finishes, its destructive
consequences become readily apparent and, potentially, quantifiable.
Interest is piqued as media report damages, often in the form of
casualty counts, eyewitness testimonies, or visuals of destroyed
property. Shortly after, experts estimate the costs of material
damages, as well as a timeline and budget for repairs. Politicians—
including international statesmen and stateswomen—craft plans for
reconstruction and rehabilitation. Citizens on the ground soldier on,
finding ways to overcome difficulties and rebuild their lives. Over
time, as infrastructure is repaired and victims’ physical wounds heal,
politicians move on to new, more pressing issues. Mass violence thus
fades from attention and is relegated to the past. Time stubbornly
marches on.
Though perhaps intuitively appealing, pivotal global trends
continually attest to the inadequacy of this simplified linear event
model of mass violence. The year 2020 alone (in which the bulk of
this manuscript was written), with its compounding global tragedies,
featured numerous shocks and shifts explicable only with reference
to festering wounds of history that defy the event model’s
assumptions. The Covid-19 pandemic, for example, certainly caused
new waves of death and destruction, but it also preyed on lingering
structural injustices in social and political systems, stemming from
legacies of mass violence that hibernate politically during periods of
prosperity.3 State-led responses to the pandemic, including public
finger-pointing and immigration restrictions, similarly reflected deep-
rooted global hierarchies and rivalries, developed due to mass
violence and subsequent, ongoing suspicion and tension.4 In the
midst of shutdowns and simmering frustration, the May 2020 death
of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers ignited
outrage and protests across the globe. This transnational movement
focused not only on the specific heartbreak of Floyd’s death but also
on larger questions of how the legacy of past violent oppression
such as slavery, imperialism, and Jim Crow lives on in present-day
institutions and practices.5 Meanwhile, nationalist politics in Israel,
Hungary, India, China, the United States, and elsewhere have
capitalized on pandemic-related frustrations to promote narratives of
past suffering and future glory. In the summer of 2020, the German
government even shut down one quarter of its most elite special
forces unit after discovering far-right members parroting Nazi-era
conspiracy theories about internal enemies backstabbing the nation.6
As the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen titled his
book on Vietnam’s memory of war, “Nothing Ever Dies.”7 But if that’s
the case, why do some memories lie dormant for generations only to
arise anew?
In this book, I advocate a new approach to understanding how
histories of mass violence reverberate in the present that
complicates the event model and its logics. This approach recognizes
how the legacy of mass violence can persist over time, radiating out
through networks and power structures, reshaping international
political actors and their logics of action. To fully account for these
enduring impacts, I argue for understanding the sociopolitical
processing of mass violence via the lens of collective trauma.
Drawing on the interdisciplinary insights of trauma studies
scholarship, I develop this lens to understand not only how
individuals respond to mass violence but also how the aftermath of
mass violence becomes politically embedded over time, liable not
only to shape dominant modes of thinking but also to resurge in
importance during pivotal moments and motivate action. While
rationalist approaches may envision idealized actors disregarding the
“sunk costs” of past suffering and focusing solely on future risks and
choices, I argue that collective trauma can shape how actors
interpret this future, its logics, and its lingering injustices. In the
aftermath of mass violence, collective trauma can constitute
understandings of self and other that frame notions of reconciliation,
rehabilitation, and recovery. Only by developing a theoretical lens
attuned to collective trauma’s varied, context-specific permutations
can the IR discipline fully grasp the world that mass violence has
helped create.
Take as a concrete example the 1945 charter of the United
Nations (UN), the preeminent international organization of the
twentieth century. Mainstream rationalist IR theory has traditionally
understood the organization either via the realist paradigm’s logic, as
a forum for self-interested great powers to exert influence, or via the
liberal paradigm’s logic, as a cooperative institution that helps states
negotiate mutually advantageous outcomes. Yet in addition to these
explanations, the UN also has deep roots in collective trauma,
articulated explicitly in its founding documents. The UN’s first
mission, the charter states, is “to save succeeding generations from
the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold
sorrow to mankind.”8 Though the goal of preventing war’s future
costs can certainly be understood rationally, divorced from history,
this statement is explicitly retrospective—informing the institution’s
understanding of this “scourge” were the failures of both previous
generations of leaders and, implicitly, its institutional predecessor,
the League of Nations. In the new body’s first session, alongside
administrative matters and pressing international issues such as the
refugees stranded across the globe, the General Assembly passed a
resolution condemning the crime of genocide, inspired, no doubt, by
the mass violence perpetrated by Nazi Germany. Rather than
employing stale bureaucratic language, the text resonated deeply
with prevailing psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma from the
period, stating that genocide “shocks the conscience of mankind”
and is “contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United
Nations.”9
The tension inherent in processing a diverse array of others’ pain,
including that of millions who perished in prior conflicts and
genocides, and articulating it as a motivation for collective action
alludes to the complexity inherent in collective trauma as an
international political phenomenon. These diplomats’ actions, I
argue, cannot be understood solely as a rationalized effort to
prevent the costly recurrence of violence. Such an explanation lacks
specificity for why they framed problems in this historically informed
way. A complete explanation must also account for the context of
the UN’s founding, informed by a recent history of mass violence on
a horrific scale. It must recognize that beyond strategic material
goals, the founders were also motivated by a desire to bear witness
to the collective trauma that had resulted from previous diplomatic
failures. Despite the difficulties in articulating the legacy of mass
violence, collective trauma informed not only how they understood
the potential consequences of global conflict but also how they
envisioned potential future solutions.
Before proceeding, it’s worth acknowledging that the example of
the UN is a deliberately provocative one. Indeed, the term “collective
trauma,” which I employ throughout the book, can seem misplaced
when used to describe the stodgy work of elite diplomats, gathered
in cosmopolitan Western cities, passing resolutions that impact most
people’s lived experience only indirectly. Most of those who
negotiated the UN’s charter had not fought on the battlefields of
World War II, nor had they stared down the Nazi gas chambers.
Though many worked on international political issues during the war
effort, they often learned of mass violence solely through
government and media reports, witness testimony, or even simply
public discourse. This distance is suggestive of the broader
observation that often those elite actors best equipped to avoid the
most acute violence of international politics are also those who both
often order it and exert outsize control in shaping domestic and
international responses. In presenting work on collective trauma at
conferences and workshops, I’ve similarly encountered resistance to
extending the term “trauma” to collectives, beyond specific
psychiatric diagnostic criteria applied in clinical settings. Doing so,
some contend, may dilute the necessary attention paid to the very
real pain of those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). This disorder, which I discuss at length throughout the
book, is especially prevalent among survivors of combat, wartime
sexual violence, and natural disasters—all central concerns for IR
scholarship. Victims of these forms of violence are often poorly
represented in international politics, and their experiences rightly
deserve scholarly attention. Some may fear that broadening the
term “trauma” to collectives undermines this book’s primary goal of
orienting scholarly attention to unseen aspects of the aftermath of
mass violence.
Yet despite the worthiness of focusing attention on individuals’
struggles with psychic trauma, this medicalized interpretation is a
limited one, representing only a single vantage point on the larger
issues implicated in mass violence’s multivalent social, psychological,
and political processing. Though elites often avoid direct experiences
of mass violence, they are deeply implicated in the international
political systems that both inflict this violence and are subsequently
tasked with interpreting and responding to it. Individuals may be the
primary nodes for experiencing mass violence, but its effects seep
out, shaping political cultures and the institutions that govern them.
Similarly, mass violence experienced and interpreted by larger
communities and their institutions can reverberate back on
individuals and frame their thinking, making trauma particularly
difficult to isolate in individuals’ psyches.10 Indeed, this
macropolitical regulation of individual interpretations is often poorly
captured by the norms of medical diagnoses.
For this reason, I employ throughout this book the alternative
term “collective trauma,” reflecting an approach in tune with what I
see as a more comprehensive reading of the term’s long-term,
multivalent evolution into the twenty-first century. Originally
stemming from the Greek for “wound,” the concept of “trauma” has
developed substantially over time, from the physical to the
neurological and later the psychological and social. Indeed, the
contemporary PTSD diagnosis itself reflects a compromise forged in
the late 1970s to meet specific demands within American
psychiatry.11 Unsurprisingly, it exhibits numerous shortcomings and
biases that have led to ample critical re-evaluations.12 Scholars have
argued that PTSD is both over-applied and under-theorized13 and
that it neglects mass violence’s multifaceted impacts beyond isolated
individuals’ brains. By the final decades of the twentieth century,
scholars in the humanities and social theory thus began
conceptualizing trauma in new ways to better capture those
interpretive qualities often overlooked by the medical
establishment.14 Traumatic shocks impact how individuals grapple
with their own experiences not only psychologically but also
spiritually, socially, and politically. Trauma thus plays a complex role
in shaping individuals’ representations of such experiences, as well
as interpretations by others (including political leaders) who may not
have experienced violence firsthand. Literary theorist Cathy Caruth,
a leading voice in the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies, has
thus defined trauma more broadly as a delayed response to an
“overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events.” This
delay, she posits, problematizes “referential” models of history based
on linear timing—including, I would argue, the “event” model that
dominates IR—raising questions of how to represent violence not yet
fully processed by its victims or their communities.15 As chapter 2,
which theorizes collective trauma more fully, will outline, it is
precisely here, in the tension inherent in individuals narrating
traumatic experiences, that I build my conceptualization of collective
trauma as the multilevel crisis in representation inherent in the
sociopolitical processing of mass violence. As large numbers of
individuals undergo related psychic shocks and bear witness to their
experiences of mass violence, the crisis in representation facing
them reverberates outward, shaping politics at multiple levels of
aggregation. Eventually, narratives of mass violence’s legacy can
collectivize trauma, making it relevant to groups and the institutions
that represent them. Despite the tension inherent in transforming
individuals’ experiences into collective trauma narratives, I argue
that they are a vital force both in the constitution of political actors
and in framing their logics of action.
Framed in this general way, the role of collective trauma in
international politics may seem obvious and uncontroversial. But
recognizing the complexities inherent in the legacy of mass violence
is hardly the norm in IR scholarship. By atomizing mass violence into
discrete episodes concluded in linear time, much of IR sanitizes
collective trauma from analysis, focusing instead on the concrete
changes that violent “events” produce in the balance of power,
international political economy, or security calculations. This remains
the case even in scholarship investigating the longer-term impacts of
mass violence—such work tends to focus less on sociopolitical
imaginaries and more on tangible, quantifiable changes in
outcomes.16 The rationalist approaches that dominate IR’s
mainstream often take for granted status quo arrangements forged
in fire, assuming self-interested actors will remain equally rational
wealth- and security-driven egoists in the wake of devastation. The
classic neorealist analogy of the international system as a billiards
table with states as the balls omits the complex evolution of subjects
following collision, accounting only for the ricocheting of similar,
preexisting, structurally sound objects. More recent neopositivist
iterations of this mainstream have, in many ways, intensified this
sanitization by distilling the complexities of mass violence’s legacy
into impersonal statistics that fail to capture the subtleties of psychic
experience or its social and political interpretation. Collective trauma,
I will demonstrate, poses a dilemma for mainstream positivist
scholarship, which cannot easily accommodate such a nuanced,
latent, subjective, historically contingent, and non-systematic
phenomenon.17
Outside the disciplinary mainstream, in recent decades, several
noteworthy critical contributions have begun incorporating the
concept of trauma into IR’s theoretical toolkit and exploring its
potential entanglements with concepts such as memory, ontological
security, and transitional justice.18 From this literature, two
exemplary monographs stand out. First, Jenny Edkins’s 2003 Trauma
and the Memory of Politics draws on a psychoanalytic understanding
of trauma to examine how states can co-opt the aftermath of
violence to reassert their power—a form of what she terms “political
abuse.” Through careful interpretive analysis, Edkins elucidates how
even modern liberal democratic states’ legitimacy often depends on
erasure of trauma—for example, medicalizing soldiers’ traumatic
responses to war in order to return them to active duty or
pathologize their natural aversion to the gruesome reality of state
power. Yet despite its clear insight, the book’s argument rests on a
problematic assumption that the “dominant views” of the state will
necessarily suppress or instrumentalize trauma. It thus raises
questions about the degree to which, in certain circumstances,
trauma can meaningfully challenge state identities and inform policy
agendas.19
Second and more recently, Emma Hutchison’s Affective
Communities has theorized how in the wake of traumatic events,
shared emotions can link together local, national, and even
transnational “affective communities.” Hutchison’s work pays keen
attention to the representation of trauma. Through a diverse array of
cases, Hutchison demonstrates how linguistic and visual
representations—primarily spread through mass media or
government propaganda—create shared meanings that consolidate
bonds in national and transnational space.20 However, despite her
success in linking trauma to macroscale identities, her work leaves
open questions about how trauma interacts with power—how
trauma can not only foster transnational solidarities but also infuse
and constitute political institutions to reshape policy debates.
Further, as I have argued previously, Hutchison’s lack of engagement
with the economic dimensions of trauma can lead to problematically
narrow analysis of subalterns’ experiences of mass violence.21
In this book, I build on these recent contributions to theorize
collective trauma’s foundational role in the international system—an
echo of the mass violence that permeates world politics. Trauma
does not simply foster temporary shocks or emotional outpourings
for preexisting actors or groups. Rather, this book’s central argument
is that collective trauma can shape the enduring understandings of
self and other that delineate the international arena’s primary actors,
as well as the logics informing these actors’ interactions. For this
reason, I conceptualize collective trauma as a multilevel crisis in
representation—the result of initial violent disjunctures reverberating
through complex political systems. This unique approach has
multiple advantages. First and foremost, it helps expand analysis
beyond the aftermath of acute violent events to longer-term
structural violence, oppression, and injustice embedded in the
international system. This initial expansion serves a second, related
goal of extending the study of trauma beyond the Western contexts
in which trauma studies has traditionally been developed and taught
to better account for the legacy of diverse forms of suffering,
depredation, and oppression that have disproportionately impacted
those in the non-West. Third, it allows scholarship to combat the
problematic relativism of certain existing approaches, differentiating
the traumas of actors with the resources to “work through”
(materially, psychically, and socially) from actors without those
resources.22 Taken together, these additions prove vital to helping
the IR discipline more fully grapple with the traumatic legacy of
varied forms of structural mass violence—including colonialism,
genocide, and ethnic cleansing—that have helped maintain the
international system’s enduring hierarchies.
In many ways, this theoretical goal of crafting a flexible lens
suitable to investigating collective trauma’s permutations across time
and space might seem lofty. By attuning IR scholarship to the
interdisciplinary insight of trauma studies, I seek not only to enrich
the discipline’s understanding of how histories of violence
reverberate into the present but also, as later chapters will
demonstrate more clearly, to destabilize some of IR’s most taken-for-
granted concepts. In this sense, this book is fundamentally a work of
international political theory in the mold of what Ian Shapiro calls
“problematizing redescription.”23 It flips common understandings of
violence’s aftermath in IR on their head, providing a new approach
to their interpretation. Because collective trauma is implicated in the
formation of so many institutions vital to international politics, I
argue that it must be understood as an ontological condition of
international life.
Yet in other regards, my ambitions in this book are more modest.
I do not seek to identify a falsely parsimonious explanation of
collective trauma as an isolatable causal mechanism with specific,
consistent effects, nor do I predict how it will develop into the
future. Collective trauma’s impacts are deeply contextual,
comprehensible solely in relation to the political dynamics that shape
trauma’s narration and interpretation. Further, given my goal of
applying trauma studies insight outside the context of its original
development, I exercise caution in my empirical analysis so that my
lens is not overly prescriptive. While I demonstrate how scholars can
draw on my theoretical framework as an ideal-typical heuristic to
trace collective trauma’s impacts over time, analysis must also
remain sensitive to the unique conditions from which collective
trauma emerges and in which it is interpreted, as well as the
alternative forces and identities with which it interacts. For this
reason, in this book’s second, empirical part, I deploy this lens in
three detailed historical investigations into the legacy of colonialism
in Indian state-building and development planning, Israel’s long-term
reckoning with the genocide of European Jewry, and the specific
discursive impact of PTSD in twenty-first-century American foreign
policy imaginaries. These three cases demonstrate not only the
varied roles collective trauma can play across time and space but
also how scholarship can employ this book’s lens without forcing
complex historical developments into a Procrustean bed of theory.
Taken together, they reflect back on my theorization’s strengths and
limitations, alluding to its transportability across time and space. In
so doing, they reaffirm my “problematizing redescription” of mass
violence’s legacy as collective trauma, encouraging further potential
reflection on collective trauma’s wide impacts, as well as what
precisely falls under the disciplinary gaze of IR.
The interdisciplinary study of trauma has already reshaped
multiple other disciplines in recent decades and deserves far deeper
engagement in IR, especially considering the discipline’s long-
standing interests in war, colonialism, genocide, and other forms of
politically motivated mass violence. As Caruth writes, consideration
of trauma’s disruption of linear timing and problematization of
memory involves a rethinking of how scholarship engages in
historical analysis. She even suggests that such a vision necessitates
a paradigmatic shift—that one can view “history [as] precisely the
way we are implicated in each other’s traumas.”24 Though perhaps,
when applied to IR, such a shift will need to be more qualified, I
provocatively ask if the same thinking might extend to the
international system. To what extent do international politics reflect
how we are implicated in one another’s collective traumas?

The Logic of the Argument: Methodology and

Methods
I divide this book into two parts, the first primarily theoretical and
the second primarily empirical. Though they can certainly be read
independently, read together they demonstrate both the value added
to empirical analysis by the first part’s lens and the broader utility of
a collective trauma-based framework for IR scholarship. The first
part builds on this chapter’s introduction, theorizing collective trauma
as an emergent phenomenon and the foundational role it can play in
the identity discourses that constitute the subjects, objects, and
logics of international political action.25 These theoretical chapters
serve as the “problematizing redescription” that Shapiro highlights as
a primary goal of political theory. Together, they offer a
“recharacterization that speaks to the inadequacies in the prior
account,” and in turn, this vision serves as a potent lens for analysis,
uncovering new aspects of these cases neglected in prevailing IR
and historical scholarship.26 Before proceeding, however, it’s worth
briefly outlining the methodological foundations of this theoretical
lens, which I understand in the mold of Weberian ideal-typification.
This vision of theory diverges from that of much mainstream social
science. I do not aspire to offer nomothetic social laws or even a
description of collective trauma as a systematic, objective
phenomenon with consistent effects across time and space. Rather, I
demonstrate how theorizing collective trauma in a more self-
reflexive, historically informed manner can serve both as a powerful
heuristic for empirical analysis and as a potent critique of
mainstream IR models of the international system.
 Ideal types are an integral part of Max Weber’s verstehen
sociology (commonly translated as “interpretive sociology”),
deployable across a wide range of research paradigms and social
science disciplines.27 Weber himself crafted paradigmatic examples
of ideal types in his own empirical scholarship, including the
Protestant work ethic, the spirit of capitalism, or even the state as
an institution possessing a monopoly on violence.28 Yet despite the
ideal type’s broad applicability and numerous examples of ideal-
typical theories that have become commonplace in political
discourse, they operate with a distinct and often misunderstood
logic.29 Instead of aspiring to identify nomothetic or probabilistic
social covering laws or distilled causal mechanisms applicable across
contexts, ideal-type theories are characterized by their flexible case-
specific application. They are formulated as deliberate and practical
abstractions that draw on the “one-sided accentuation of one or
more points of view” to focus attention on specific patterns and
meanings embedded within complex, multifaceted social phenomena
that differ substantially across contexts.30
In this sense, ideal-type theory does not aspire to model an
objective reality “out there,” in the world, but rather offers a
purposely stylized, partial account that serves as a lens for empirical
analysis. Regardless of one’s philosophical wagers regarding the
possibility of a truly objective model for various phenomena,31 from
a practical standpoint, this approach is ill suited to the study of
collective trauma—an ideational, non-systematic intersubjective
phenomenon that is continually interpreted and reinterpreted,
shifting in meaning across time and space. Following Weber, I argue
this book’s theorizations should be judged not via a correspondence
theory of truth but rather by their utility in crafting analytical
narratives that offer new, relevant empirical insights, contributing to
outstanding scholarly debates. This pragmatic vision of theory helps
explain the necessary dialogue between the two parts of this book.
The first offers an ideal-typical theoretical lens that synthesizes
interdisciplinary inputs to craft a conceptual vocabulary and
analytically general model of collective trauma’s role in identity
discourses. The second applies it to contribute to existing empirical
literatures, demonstrating the theory’s appeal as a means of
orienting abstraction and a launching point for future inquiry.
Two addenda to Weber’s articulation of ideal-type theory help
elucidate my application in this book. First, because multiple ideal
types can direct attention to different aspects of the same
phenomenon, Jackson writes that the process of ideal-typification
must always begin with “stand taking”—articulating a value-based
account of what, among the diversity of potential lenses for viewing
events, is worth emphasizing and why.32 In the interest of
transparency, I thus begin this book with the critical normative
assertion that the collective psychological, social, and political long-
term suffering imposed by mass violence has too long been
neglected by the IR discipline. My belief that collective trauma
warrants further investigation is shaped not only by the discernible
impact I demonstrate that it has had on social life, evidenced by
both my cases and a critical reading of the twenty-first-century
global rise of grievance-based identity politics. This belief also stems
from my intuitive normative claim that collective trauma merits
scholarly attention and empathy. The lens of collective trauma, I
argue, can help IR scholarship account for the mass suffering that
results from international politics’ routinization of mass violence,
especially in the forms of war, imperialism, and structural inequality.
In so doing, this lens can help uncover and understand long-
standing international political injustices that have been neglected by
the discipline for too long and (potentially) create new urgency
around the need to address them. Over time, it can even help usher
in a new IR tradition from the perspective of those who suffer most
due to international politics’ status quo.
Second, though Weber did not delve into the potential
complications inherent in employing what many social scientists refer
to as “essentially contested concepts”33 in crafting ideal-type theory,
I articulate the two main conceptual pillars of my theoretical lens
—“collective trauma” and “identity”—as sensitizing concepts.34 In
this sense, the definitions I offer of each are explicitly adaptable and
open, drawing blurred boundaries between related phenomena to
best facilitate the absorption of interdisciplinary insight. Such an
approach, I argue, is necessary as an exercise in intellectual humility
regarding the possibility of offering concrete idealizations of complex
adaptive social phenomena that change dynamically over time.35
Treating these terms as sensitizing concepts thus helps break down
disciplinary silos and facilitate dialogue between scholars addressing
similar conceptual terrain with differing motivations, methodologies,
and terminology. As Gabriele Rosenthal argues, recognition of this
potential fruitful relationship between ideal-type theory and
sensitizing concepts can help move forward the vision of interpretive
social science articulated by Weber.36 Indeed, the process of
interpretation benefits substantially from the synthesis and
refinement of multiple existing lenses. Recognizing that
conceptualizations can have murky boundaries with unstable cores
thus opens theory up to continual progressive refinement and
branching, a boon to its development over the long term.
Following the first part’s theoretical interventions, the second part
contains three chapters that examine specific issues in the history of
Indian, Israeli, and American state-building and foreign
policymaking, demonstrating how collective trauma can shape
understandings of self and other, as well as the logics of political
action. Each empirical application employs my theoretical lens to
orient critical discourse analysis (CDA) that engages with a large
array of primary material, drawn from relevant published and
unpublished archives, media accounts, and official government
documents. CDA is a method uniquely well suited to uncovering the
social meaning-making that translates narratives of collective trauma
into the larger identity discourses that constitute the basis for
international political action.37 Unlike more traditional historical
approaches or methodologically individualistic textual analysis, CDA
deliberately orients scholarly attention to intertextuality, the idea that
relevant meanings are negotiated through the interplay of multiple
texts. In this sense, CDA emphasizes that while texts may have
individual authors, “it is very rare for a text to be the work of any
one person”; texts are sites for negotiating discursive differences,
and thus, they reveal traces of larger intersubjective ideologies and
power dynamics.38 For this reason, my historical examinations parse
a wide array of primary sources from relevant political leaders and
organizations. They seek both to characterize key individual actors’
thoughts and to contextualize the themes and references that
emerge across them, discursively constructing subjects’ and objects’
identities and the relationships between them.39 Though some
scholars engaged in CDA employ formal techniques such as
metaphor analysis, graphical argument analysis, and predicate
analysis,40 given the extensiveness of my ideal-typical theoretical
lens, I refrain from adopting further prescriptive tools. As the cliché
goes, when one is holding a hammer, every problem begins to look
like a nail. Despite my emphasis on theory development, I endeavor
not to impose my lens too heavy-handedly onto aspects of my
empirical analyses better suited to alternative understandings.
Throughout my empirical chapters, I draw attention to both the
strengths and the limitations of my theoretical lens in orienting
analysis, as well as the array of other factors shaping the impact of
collective trauma.
Before proceeding to an outline of this book’s chapters, it’s worth
briefly explaining my case selection criteria—why I chose to focus
specifically on India and Israel during their independence periods
and US foreign policy after 9/11. Because of the verstehen Weberian
ideal-type theoretical lens I deploy, I do not view case selection
according to the neopositivist small-N criteria for nomothetic
generalization. Each of these cases was selected precisely to
demonstrate the utility of my theoretical insight, and thus, they
should not be seen as representative points along a unidimensional
distribution of collective traumas. Collective trauma’s contextual
dependence and narrative embedding make such a simplified
comparison impossible. Further, though the collective diversity of
these cases—focusing on differing time periods, regions, and political
contexts—does allude to my framework’s broad potential
applicability, this insight is merely suggestive. While predicting
collective trauma’s future emergence and potency may be
impossible, estimating the extent of its impact across time and space
is a complex empirical question for future analysis. The range of this
book’s cases should not be taken as insinuating a subtle nomothetic
generalization about collective trauma’s spread across time and
space. Rather, it simply implies that this lens is relevant beyond any
specific scenario or era.
Instead, I suggest reading these cases primarily in two ways.
First, because these cases all demonstrate the inadequacy of
existing scholarly explanations and the potential for applying my
alternative, they all qualify as “deviant” or “crucial.” Deviant cases
are those not fully explained by existing theoretical models,
suggesting the need for theoretical innovation, while crucial cases
are those not fully explained by existing theories but for which new,
developing theories do provide insight.41 The logic behind these
cases is simple, transcending methodological orientations. If
dominant theories reach a roadblock in explaining relevant behavior,
but new theories (including those based on differing ontological and
epistemological assumptions) suggest a possible path forward, then
these cases prove apt for reflecting on the merits of these new
approaches. Taken together, this book’s cases facilitate a dialogue
about the broader contribution of the theoretical lens to predominant
disciplinary theories, as well as the potential range of future
empirical applications. Second, and complementarily, because of
their detail, originality, and deep engagement with existing
historiographic issues related to their respective subject matters,
each case can be read independently as idiographic case studies or
Weberian analytical narratives.42 Again, the logic here transcends
methodological orientation; because each case responds to specific
questions identified in relevant literatures, they can serve as
theoretically inspired contributions to historical debates. Collective
trauma, I demonstrate, helps guide scholarship to relevant historical
patterns and previously neglected perspectives. Ultimately, though,
investigations into collective trauma’s potential role require careful
consideration of the wide array of relevant factors shaping its
contours.

Outline of the Chapters

This chapter has offered a brief introduction to collective trauma, as
well as an overview of how the book’s argument holds together. In
chapter 2, I delve more deeply into this concept, addressing both
the historical development of understandings of trauma and the
promise offered by an interdisciplinary theorization of its collective
dimensions. I begin with a political genealogy of trauma that
explores how international political changes have catalyzed the
term’s development over the past two centuries across multiple
disciplines. From this genealogy, I distill a central paradox implicit in
trauma’s translation from individual to social—traumatic events
repress memory and isolate victims, yet at the same time, bearing
witness to trauma can also shape political imaginaries. I
demonstrate how this paradox scales up to multiple levels of
analysis. Rather than focusing solely on a partial vision of the
phenomenon, I embrace it, defining collective trauma explicitly as
the multilevel crisis in representation that stems from the
politicization of mass violence. Further, I outline how this rippling
crisis can interact with existing structural, economic, and historical
conditions, differentiating collective trauma in communities with the
resources to “work through” from those without such resources. This
insight helps combat the Western bias of existing trauma studies
literature and build a lens that does not succumb to relativism as it is
transported across diverse global contexts. Ultimately, I argue,
narrative is vital for translating this crisis into politically potent
narratives that allow political systems to bear witness to mass
violence. I thus outline how IR scholarship can adapt hermeneutic
tools from literary theory and historiography to read collective
trauma in analysis.
Theorizing collective trauma’s potential emergence from
international political dynamics helps usher the insights of trauma
studies into IR, while also orienting IR scholars’ attention to a vital
but often overlooked phenomenon. Yet chapter 2 leaves open
important questions about how collective trauma combines or
competes with other forces to constitute international political actors
and shape political action. Without addressing these concerns,
skeptics may dismiss collective trauma as epiphenomenal. To remedy
this, in chapter 3, I theorize the identity discourses that collective
trauma narratives can infuse and shape. The concept of identity has
received ample attention in IR since the advent of constructivism in
the late 1980s and early 1990s and is now often incorporated as a
foundational component of systemic theories of international politics.
Indeed, Allan, Vucetic, and Hopf even argue that the global
distribution of identity is central to understanding the evolution of
system-level international orders.43 Yet because of the murkiness of
the term “identity,” scholars continue to debate its definition,
breadth, applicability, and relevance. In recent years, some have
even come to dismiss identity’s practical utility in analysis. I argue
that, when properly theorized, identities and the discourses that
constitute them are vital ideal types for the IR discipline. Indeed,
identities play a foundational role in determining the logics of
international political action, creating the subjects, objects, and
motivations that constitute the international system. Inspired by
work on narrativity from Paul Ricoeur, Marya Schechtman, and
Margaret Somers, I develop my own, alternative theorization of
identity discourses as constituted by the interplay of narratives.
Identity narratives are ontologically fluid constructs that bridge the
divide between the individual and the social by weaving together
personal experiential memory and common, public knowledge. In so
doing, they constitute the international system’s macrosocial
subjects and create its logics of political action. Though collective
trauma narratives must contend with various others in identity
discourses, their deep emotional resonance and relevance to the
mass violence that shapes international politics make them
particularly important competitors. By outlining the role of identity
discourses in the constitution of international politics, the chapter
more fully theorizes collective trauma’s foundational role and the
means through which it inspires meaningful political change.
Chapter 4 begins this book’s second, empirical part, offering a
case study drawn from the history of decolonization. It analyzes
collective trauma’s impact on economic nationalist discourses in
India during the period around independence, before the Second
Five-Year Plan institutionalized P. C. Mahalanobis’s autarkic economic
model. Contrary to many economic historians’ interpretations of this
model as inspired by Soviet socialism, Baldev Raj Nayar has argued
that its roots lie in economic nationalist ideas that portrayed
industrialization and self-sufficiency as vital to a particular vision of
India’s security.44 I build on Nayar’s work by unpacking the roots of
economic nationalism in collective trauma, paying particular
attention to how narrations of mass violence created a logic
equating liberal economic policies with devastating famines and
political oppression. The chapter’s first section theorizes economic
nationalism as a form of identity discourse that seeks both to
constitute the “economic nation” and to motivate its policymaking.
Then I turn to the nineteenth-century roots of Indian economic
nationalism, examining how “drain theory” drew on narrations of
poverty, famine, and colonial oppression as collectively traumatic to
justify its policy proposals. In the next section of chapter 4, I outline
the four most influential variants of economic nationalism during the
independence period: Gandhian, Marxist, big business, and
Nehruvian. Though their advocates differed substantially on many
key issues, this typology demonstrates the convergence of economic
nationalist discourse on the idea that past collective trauma
necessitated an autarkic development model. This discourse
emphasizing the merits of autarky, I argue, was not simply of
rhetorical importance. It helped ideate the closed development
model that proved resilient in Indian foreign economic policymaking
for decades.
The second case study, chapter 5, turns to Israeli state formation
and how identity discourses wrestled with the legacy of the
Holocaust. I theorize a variant of post-traumatic identity discourse
called “victimhood nationalism” to uncover how, over time, official
narratives projected post-Holocaust grievances away from Germany
and its European collaborators and toward Israel’s Arab neighbors.
This theorization strips the term “victimhood” of any pejorative
normative associations and instead understands how such narratives
function to revive embedded collective trauma for present-day
purposes. In the case of Israel, I argue that while David Ben-
Gurion’s government officially suppressed public dialogue about
Holocaust trauma during the late 1940s and early 1950s, his political
opposition realized the potency of this memory and drew on it to
challenge Ben-Gurion’s hegemonic state-building project. To help
address the Holocaust’s legacy and prevent grievances from
impacting strategic rapprochement with West Germany, Ben-Gurion
seized on the 1960 capture and subsequent trial of former high-
ranking Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann as a public forum for what
journalist Tom Segev described as “national group therapy.”45 In the
lead-up to the trial and in its televised proceedings, Ben-Gurion’s
government strategically renarrated the Jewish people’s collectively
traumatic experiences to project outstanding Holocaust grievances
away from Germany and its wartime allies and toward Israel’s
contemporary Arab neighbors, whom Israeli leadership portrayed as
the leading forces of global anti-Semitism a decade and a half after
the fall of the Nazi Third Reich. This victimhood nationalism, I
demonstrate, not only served Israel’s strategic interests but also
shaped the young state’s international orientation into the future. It
helped to integrate the hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants
from across the Arab world, while also shaping security discourses in
the lead-up to the 1967 Six-Day War.
Finally, my third case (chapter 6) turns to a question of a different
order: how increased public discourse about trauma, at multiple
levels of aggregation, has problematized the concept of war, a
central component of many IR theories of the international system.
This chapter specifically examines trauma’s interpretation via the
PTSD diagnosis in the United States, where the dominance of the
American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the consequences of the global war
on terror (GWOT) have transformed PTSD into a mainstay of foreign
policy and security discourses about military intervention. Though
PTSD was added to the DSM-III in 1980 and emerged in trauma
studies literature during the 1990s as a potent cultural script, I
demonstrate that American political leaders only began incorporating
it into foreign policy and security debates during the 2008
presidential cycle, five years after the United States invaded Iraq. In
the years since, the disorder has become what President Barack
Obama has referred to as a “signature wound of today’s wars,”
invoked by politicians across the left–right spectrum to describe the
consequences of military intervention.46 My CDA of the invocation of
PTSD by leading politicians examines how the disorder was
deliberately collectivized, contributing to a blurring of important lines
around the concept of war that reformulated logics of international
interaction. Specifically, I argue that increased public attention to
psychic trauma due to state-level military intervention has
contributed to a unique erosion of war’s implicit spatiotemporal
limitations, extending the consequences of military conflicts into an
unknown future and outside the war zone, onto the home front. This
shift, I demonstrate, has had immense normative consequences,
blurring the pivotal ethical distinction between victim and perpetrator
and allowing traumatized American soldiers to crowd out foreign
victims in discussions of the GWOT’s impacts.
In the book’s conclusion, chapter 7, I consider the larger research
agenda of orienting scholarly attention to collective trauma’s
multifaceted role in the international system: the need for a “trauma
turn” in IR, as well as an “international politics turn” in trauma
studies. Too often, collective trauma’s role is neglected in IR, as
scholars consider mass violence solely via the lens of events with
concrete, immediately apparent outcomes. Recognizing the complex
legacy of mass violence as collective trauma, I argue, unveils
dynamics that shape international politics over the long term and
thus proves adaptable across time and space. Alternatively, by
incorporating insight from IR into the interdisciplinary field of trauma
studies, scholars can better account for the long-term global
footprint of mass violence, uncovering how international political
systems both reflect and govern collective trauma’s diffusion. While
this book only begins this vital new dialogue, its theoretical lens and
case studies reveal the enormous potential of a two-way
engagement between IR and trauma studies. Such a broadened
perspective can help both fields uncover collective trauma’s often-
ignored global impacts and help bear witness to mass violence in
pursuit of global justice.

1 Benjamin de Carvalho, Halvard Leira, and John M. Hobson, “The Big Bangs of
IR: The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648 and 1919,” Millennium:
Journal of International Studies 39, no. 3 (May 2011): 735–58.
2
For more on the politics of timing in IR, see Andrew R. Hom, “Timing Is
Everything: Toward a Better Understanding of Time and International Politics,”
International Studies Quarterly 62, no. 1 (March 1, 2018): 69–79; Andrew R. Hom,
International Relations and the Problem of Time (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2020).
3 Richard A. Oppel Jr. et al., “The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of

Coronavirus,” New York Times, July 5, 2020,

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/05/us/coronavirus-latinos-african-
americans-cdc-data.html?referringSource=articleShare.
4
Jessica Chen Weiss, “How Coronavirus Changes the Political Outlook in China
and the U.S.,” Washington Post, April 23, 2020,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/23/how-coronavirus-changes-
political-outlook-china-us/.
5 Chaseedaw Giles, “Op-Ed: I’m a Black Social Media Manager in the Age of

George Floyd. Each Day Is a New Trauma,” Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2020,
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-23/social-media-trauma-black-
killings.
6
Katrin Bennhold, “Germany Disbands Special Forces Group Tainted by Far-
Right Extremists,” New York Times, July 1, 2020,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/world/europe/german-special-forces-far-
right.html.
7 Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

8
United Nations, “United Nations Charter,” http://www.un.org/en/charter-
united-nations/.
 9 United Nations General Assembly, “96 (1). The Crime of Genocide” (1946),
https://undocs.org/en/A/RES/96(I).
10
For further elaboration of this conceptual framework, see Adam B. Lerner,
“What’s It Like to Be a State? An Argument for State Consciousness,” International
Theory 13, no. 2 (July 2021): 260–86.
11 See Allan V. Horwitz, PTSD: A Short History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 2018); Hannah S. Decker, The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic

Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013).
12
See, for example, Vanessa Pupavac, “Pathologizing Populations and
Colonizing Minds: International Psychosocial Programs in Kosovo,” Alternatives:
Global, Local, Political 27, no. 4 (October 2002): 489–511; Vanessa Pupavac,
“Therapeutic Governance: Psycho-Social Intervention and Trauma Risk
Management,” Disasters 25, no. 4 (December 2001): 358–72.
13 Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress

Disorder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

14
Yoav Di-Capua, “Trauma and Other Historians,” Historical
Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 41, no. 3 (2015): 1–13.
15 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History,

twentieth anniversary ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 11.
16
Ghobarah, Huth, and Russett, for example, have demonstrated robustly how
civil wars harm life expectancy and other public health outcomes years after
violence ends, though they do not investigate the latent sociopolitical legacy of
these impacts. See Hazem Adam Ghobarah, Paul Huth, and Bruce Russett, “Civil
Wars Kill and Maim People—Long after the Shooting Stops,” American Political
Science Review 97, no. 2 (2003): 189–202.
17 Michelle Balaev, “Trauma Studies,” in A Companion to Literary Theory, ed.

David H. Richter (Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 2018), 363.

18
Duncan Bell, ed., Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the
Relationship between Past and Present (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006); Erica Simone Almeida Resende and Dovile Budryte, eds., Memory and
Trauma in International Relations: Theories, Cases, and Debates (London:
Routledge, 2014); K. M. Fierke, “Whereof We Can Speak, Thereof We Must Not Be
Silent: Trauma, Political Solipsism and War,” Review of International Studies 30,
no. 4 (October 2004): 471–91; K. M. Fierke and Nicola Mackay, “To ‘See’ Is to
Break an Entanglement: Quantum Measurement, Trauma and Security,” Security
Dialogue 51, no. 5 (October 2020): 450–66; Kate Schick, “Acting Out and Working
Through: Trauma and (In)Security,” Review of International Studies 37, no. 4
(2011): 1837–55.
19 Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2003), 7, 11.

 20 Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective
Emotions after Trauma (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
21
Adam B. Lerner, “Theorizing Collective Trauma in International Political
Economy,” International Studies Review 21, no. 4 (December 2019): 560.
22 The ideas of acting out and working through trauma stem from Freudian

psychoanalysis. Acting out refers to a problematic repetition compulsion that

makes trauma linger in individuals’ psyches. Working through, on the other hand,
relates to successful mourning practices that allow for a critical distance from
precipitating trauma. These concepts have since been adapted outside of Freudian
thought. For an explanation of their application to historiography and social theory,
see Dominick LaCapra and Amos Goldberg, “ ‘Acting-Out’ and ‘Working-Through’
Trauma: Excerpt from Interview with Professor Dominick LaCapra” (Yad Vashem
Shoah Resource Center, June 9, 1998),
https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203646.pdf.
23
Ian Shapiro, “Problems, Methods, and Theories in the Study of Politics, or
What’s Wrong with Political Science and What to Do about It,” Political Theory 30,
no. 4 (August 2002): 596–619.
24 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 24.

25
For an excellent framework for understanding identity’s role in shaping
international political action, see Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse
Analysis and the Bosnian War, (New York: Routledge, 2006).
26 Shapiro, “Problems, Methods, and Theories.”
27
For an adaptation of Weberian ideal types to a critical realist philosophical
ontology, see Heikki Patomäki, After International Relations: Critical Realism and
the (Re)Construction of World Politics (London: Routledge, 2002), 108–9.
28 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen

Kalberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Max Weber, “Politics as
Vocation,” in Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society: New Translations on
Politics, Bureaucracy, and Social Stratification, ed. Tony Waters and Dagmar
Waters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 129–98.
29
For Weber’s articulation of the “ideal type” and its application to empirical
research, see Max Weber, “The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge in Social Science and
Social Policy,” in Max Weber: Collected Methodological Writings, ed. Hans Henrik
Bruun and Sam Whimster, trans. Hans Henrik Bruun (London: Routledge, 2012),
100–38. For an understanding of how this model can guide work in IR, see Patrick
Thaddeus Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy
of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (London: Routledge,
2011), 112–55.
30 Weber, “The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge.”
31 On philosophical wagers, see Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry.
32
Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry, 144–46.
 33 See W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society 56, no. 1 (June 1, 1956): 167–98.
34
Herbert Blumer, “What Is Wrong with Social Theory?,” American Sociological
Review 19, no. 1 (1954): 3–10.
35 Emilian Kavalski, “The Fifth Debate and the Emergence of Complex

International Relations Theory: Notes on the Application of Complexity Theory to

the Study of International Life,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 20, no.
3 (September 2007): 435–54; Antoine Bousquet and Simon Curtis, “Beyond
Models and Metaphors: Complexity Theory, Systems Thinking and International
Relations,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 24, no. 1 (March 2011): 43–
62; Matthew J. Hoffmann and John Riley, “The Science of Political Science:
Linearity or Complexity in Designing Social Inquiry,” New Political Science 24, no. 2
(June 2002): 303–20; Adam B. Lerner, “Theorizing Unpredictability in International
Politics: A New Approach to Trump and the Trump Doctrine,” Cambridge Review of
International Affairs 34, no. 3 (2021): 360–82.
36
Gabriele Rosenthal, “A Plea for a More Interpretive, More Empirical and More
Historical Sociology,” in The Shape of Sociology in the 21st Century: Tradition and
Renewal, ed. Devorah Kalekin-Fishman and Ann Denis (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012),
202–17.
37 Hansen, Security as Practice.
38
Ruth Wodak, “What CDA Is About: A Summary of Its History, Important
Concepts and Its Developments,” in Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, ed. Ruth
Wodak and Michael Meyer (London: Sage, 2001), 11.
39 For an excellent methodological guide outlining how scholars can move back

and forth between individual texts and larger social meanings, see Vincent Pouliot,
“‘Sobjectivism’: Toward a Constructivist Methodology,” International Studies
Quarterly 51, no. 2 (June 2007): 359–84. See also Jennifer Milliken, “The Study of
Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods,”
European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 2 (June 1999): 225–54.
40
Milliken, “The Study of Discourse.” See also George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,
Metaphors We Live By: With a New Afterword (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2011).
41 See Andrew Bennett and Colin Elman, “Case Study Methods in the

International Relations Subfield,” Comparative Political Studies 40, no. 2 (February

2007): 170–95; Andrew Bennett, “Case Study Methods: Design, Use, and
Comparative Advantages,” in Models, Numbers, and Cases: Methods for Studying
International Relations, ed. Detlef F. Sprinz and Yael Wolinsky-Nahmias (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 19–55.
42
John Gerring, “Single-Outcome Studies: A Methodological Primer,”
International Sociology 21, no. 5 (September 2006): 707–34; Wolfgang Krohn,
“Interdisciplinary Cases and Disciplinary Knowledge,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Interdisciplinarity, ed. Robert Frodeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010),
31–49.
43 Bentley B. Allan, Srdjan Vucetic, and Ted Hopf, “The Distribution of Identity

and the Future of International Order: China’s Hegemonic Prospects,” International

Organization 72, no. 4 (2018): 839–69.
44
Baldev Raj Nayar, “Nationalist Planning for Autarky and State Hegemony:
Development Strategy under Nehru,” Indian Economic Review 32, no. 1 (1997):
13–38; Baldev Raj Nayar, The Modernization Imperative and Indian Planning
(Delhi: Vikas Publications, 1972).
45 Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York:

Henry Holt, 2000), 351.

46
Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the
End of Combat Operations in Iraq,” White House, August 31, 2010,
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2010/08/31/remarks-
president-address-nation-end-combat-operations-iraq.
 2
Theorizing Collective Trauma

Introduction
On June 28, 1989, Serbian president Slobodan Milošević delivered
his now infamous Gazimestan speech to approximately 1 million
transfixed Serbs gathered on Kosovo Field. Only a few years earlier,
when Milošević was a relatively unknown Communist functionary in
Belgrade, such a reception would have been unthinkable. But his
star had risen quickly, propelled by popular depictions of him as a
Serbian nationalist hero. A turning point came in 1987, when Serbia’s
then-leader sent Milošević to the hamlet of Kosovo Polje to pacify
protesting Serbs. Instead of urging calm, however, Milošević incited
further outrage. Serbian media reports subsequently lionized him for
allegedly proclaiming, “No one will ever beat this people again!”1 By
1989, when he delivered the speech commemorating the six-
hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, Milošević had
become Serbia’s president, and the idea of restoring his people’s
honor after generations of collective trauma had become a leitmotif
of his career. His remarks at the memorial crystallized these ideas, as
he referred to an “evil fate” following Serbs since the fourteenth
century, subtly connecting disparate historical experiences of mass
violence and oppression—defeats by the Ottoman Empire, the
“agony” of ethnic cleansing by the Nazi-aligned Croatian Ustaša and,
in the post–World War II era, Serbs’ relative disempowerment in
federated Yugoslavia.2 This narrative proved emotionally resonant
for many ethnic Serbs across Yugoslavia’s republics. Over the next
decade, these ideas would help mobilize thousands to commit
horrific acts of violence and eventually result in Milošević’s
prosecution for war crimes.3
What explains the resonance of Milošević’s narrative and his
ability to mobilize Serbian grievances against their neighbors?
Though rationalist political science often accounts for ethnic violence
with instrumental explanations about competition for scarce
resources4 or the breakdown of federalism, the resonance of this
particular aggressive narrative, rooted in a six-century-old mythic
battle, provides a puzzle in need of a more nuanced explanation.
Why would so many Serbs gather in an empty field, chanting in
support of a former bureaucrat agonizing over their ancestors’
losses? Former US ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann
wrote that “Serbia’s tragic flaw is an obsession with its own history.”
As a diplomat in Belgrade from before Milošević’s rise, Zimmermann
recalled “patiently [sitting] through interminable recitations by Serbs
of all walks of life about the boundless ways in which they have
been victimized through the centuries.”5 Andrew A. G. Ross,
alternatively, refers to the production of “an economy of
interconnected emotional circulations” among Serbs following
longtime Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito’s death in 1980. This
economy raised “thresholds of tolerance for violence within Yugoslav
society” and allowed Milošević to serve as “a conduit for collective
anxieties, fears, and frustrations”—a focal point for an incipient
emotionally motivated political mobilization.6 But how did history
inform and sustain these sentiments, and why would they reach a
boiling point under Milošević’s leadership in the late 1980s, fueling a
rise in bellicosity after decades of tense but peaceful cohabitation?
In this chapter, I begin to address these questions by theorizing
collective trauma as a unique manifestation of the larger, complex
phenomenon of trauma. When individuals communicate their
experiences of mass violence, I argue, they can ripple out through
communities, fomenting collective trauma that shapes political
imaginaries. The theoretical framework I develop helps in
understanding the roots and composition of narratives like
Milošević’s, as well as their ebb and flow in resonance over time in
relation to other political factors. Further, it helps to contextualize
the complex relationship between underlying psychic trauma—
present undeniably in some survivors of political violence among the
Gazimestan crowd—and the larger phenomenon of collective trauma
that Milošević stoked and exploited. Though linked, the two
phenomena are distinct, existing in theoretical and practical tension.
Only by first theorizing this complex relationship can subsequent
empirical scholarship address collective trauma’s impact across time
and space and subsequent normative scholarship question when
such narratives can be a force for good or a motivation for horrific
violence. Collective trauma is a potent political phenomenon, but
addressing its uses and abuses requires first understanding how
extreme experiences of violence extend beyond individuals to the
social world and vice versa.
To this end, I begin my theorization of collective trauma in section
2.2 and 2.3, with a brief genealogy of trauma as it has evolved in
the Western academy, tracing how the concept has developed from
individualistic physical and mental interpretations to social and
cultural ones in recent decades. This genealogy helps demonstrate
trauma’s multivalence, as well as how, in recent years, trauma has
transformed into “one of the dominant modes of representing our
relationship with the past”7—an interpretive lens employed across
both academic disciplines and popular media to describe the
experiences of individuals and, increasingly in recent years,
collectives. Trauma, I demonstrate, has always been a deeply social
and political phenomenon; understanding the role of political power
in shaping collective trauma therefore helps uncover how it adapts
across time and space. This insight helps combat Western bias in
existing trauma studies scholarship and facilitate a truly global
conceptualization of collective trauma, suitable for international
political theory.
In section 2.4.1, I draw out a few threads from this genealogy
that have characterized trauma as it has developed in medicine,
psychology, and, eventually, social and political theory, making it a
coherent though often confounding phenomenon. Crucially, though,
I argue that this history reveals a fundamental paradox inherent in
translating trauma from individuals to collectives and vice versa;
while underlying individual psychic trauma can repress memory and
break down social ties, collective trauma is typically identified as a
potent social and political force that can mobilize groups and
motivate action. Existing literature on collective trauma tends to
avoid this paradox by emphasizing either collective trauma’s roots in
individuals or its social manifestations. By contrast, I embrace this
paradox as central to understanding how the phenomenon shapes
international politics. In section 2.4.2, I demonstrate how this
foundational paradox inherent in the legacy of mass violence ripples
out into broader tensions, shaping trauma’s impacts at multiple
levels of aggregation. Thus, I define collective trauma via the
multilevel crisis in representation inherent in trauma’s socialization
and demonstrate how as trauma spreads, it interacts with existing
political and economic factors. Though narrative is vital to this crisis’
politicization, I complicate straightforward narrative analysis of
collective trauma with insight from literary theory and historiography.
Collective trauma narratives exist in problematic relation to
underlying psychic trauma, creating a narrative fallacy that fuels
political contestation over time. By attuning narrative analysis to this
contestation’s unique representative dynamics, I provide a lens to
help scholars read collective trauma, embracing its indeterminacy of
meaning without succumbing to complete relativism.

A Political Genealogy of Trauma

The roots of the term “trauma” extend back to the ancient Greek
term for wound, and for centuries its derivatives in European
languages applied primarily to bodily injuries resulting from external
forces.8 Similar usages remain in select settings to this day—
hospitals house trauma wards for acute physical injuries, and
detectives refer to blunt-force trauma as a cause of death. But the
term’s primary meaning in Western medicine and social science
began to shift during the nineteenth century from acute physical
wounds to the mental, spiritual, and social ones that can follow in
their wake.9 In addition to academic debate, global political changes
served as a primary catalyst for this shift, and thus, understanding
the term’s etymology requires engaging with scientific developments
through the lens of international politics.
The first critical re-examination of trauma’s meaning came during
the nineteenth century due to industrialization processes and their
governance. As railroads and other powerful, impersonal machinery
spread across Europe, physicians began to see peculiar, delayed
symptoms in patients who had escaped major accidents with no
obvious lesions. After a period of apparent normalcy, these supposed
bystanders transformed into victims, reporting pains, anxiety,
difficulty sleeping, memory impairment, and other symptoms whose
only plausible source was the precipitating violent event. This
delayed response became known as “railway spine,” and lawyers
quickly capitalized, leading to trauma’s institutionalization as
“nervous shock” in courtrooms across Europe.10 Still, however,
medical opinions on its etiology and veracity diverged widely. While
the acclaimed surgeon John Erichsen hypothesized that a unique
spinal compression caused a delayed reaction, neurologist Sir John
Russell Reynolds suggested that symptoms may stem simply from
the “morbid condition of idea, or of idea and emotion together,”
slowly transitioning trauma from the purely physical to potentially
also the psychological.11
French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot was another leading
figure in this bridging, linking railway spine to the since-discredited
gendered diagnosis of “florid hysteria.” During the early and mid-
nineteenth century, hysteria was most commonly diagnosed in
middle- or upper-class women by gynecologists and obstetricians.
Charcot, however, researched the disorder’s potential neurological
roots from 1872 to 1878. His approach connected female hysterics
to male patients experiencing traumatic symptoms after accidents or
even combat, helping undermine pseudo-scientific and sexist
conceptualizations of hysteria. In his writings from 1878 until his
death in 1893, Charcot became the first to synthesize a coherent
diagnosis for les nérvoses traumatiques (traumatic neurosis),
applicable across genders.12 He theorized the condition as triggered
by shocking external events but also rooted in inherited biological
predisposition.13 Charcot pioneered the use of hypnosis to force
patients to confront memories of precipitating traumatic events and
incorporate them into their present-day psyches. His student Pierre
Janet further psychologized Charcot’s expanding notions of traumatic
hysteria, suggesting that even false or implanted memories could
produce traumatic responses—an insight that expanded ideas
around trauma’s social mediation.14
Another of Charcot’s students, Sigmund Freud, spearheaded a
massive increase in interest in trauma in the psy disciplines.
Throughout his career, as Freudian psychoanalysis grew in
prominence, his conceptualization of traumatic neurosis evolved
substantially, in many ways foreshadowing the later development of
the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies. Freud trained with
Charcot in Paris from 1885 to 1886 and took from his mentor an
enormous interest in trauma’s mnemonic repression. Unlike Charcot,
however, Freud rejected notions of inherited predisposition and
instead initially theorized the condition as stemming from childhood
sexual encounters repressed from memory into the unconscious. He
argued that initial sexual shocks would lead to subsequent sporadic
symptoms when triggered by external stimuli, disrupting the
immediate cause-and-effect logic implicit in linear conceptions of
timing.15
Yet as Freud began treating the children of friends and other
prominent members of Viennese society, he amended his views. He
became increasingly loath to attribute cases of hysteria to childhood
sexual trauma, which presumably would be blamed on his patients’
families. Instead, he shifted his explanation of traumatic symptoms,
suggesting they could be the result of repressed childhood sexual
fantasies. This explanation came to be referred to as Freud’s
“seduction theory,” emblematic of his problematic larger approach to
female sexuality.16 Further, during this period, Freud theorized
traumas as stemming not so much from the content of the
precipitating experiences but rather their evolution in the psyche
over time, reinforcing the idea of latency as central to trauma’s
pathology. “It is not the experience itself which acts traumatically,
but the memory of it when this is re-animated.”17 While Charcot’s
hypnosis sought to uncover presumably “real” repressed experiences
triggering traumatic symptoms, Freud’s evolution during this period
opened the study of trauma to ideas of interpretation, both of the
patient and of the analyst. Indeed, this emphasis on hermeneutics
helps explain Freudian trauma theory’s continued relevance in the
humanities, even as Freud’s writings have lost favor in psychology
and psychiatry.
These developing ideas about psychic trauma, however, remained
relatively marginal during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, until the mass violence of international politics spurred
their reinvestigation. This intellectual history alludes to the deep
historical intertwining of trauma and international political violence—
the former eventually became both a paradigmatic response to and
an interpretive lens for the latter. World War I, which occurred as
psychoanalysis was increasing in prominence, was the first major
catalyst in this development, sparking a dramatic increase in these
salience due to the mass incidence of wartime trauma—then
typically called “shell shock”—among soldiers. Ironically, though
trauma’s symptoms could leave individual soldiers feeling isolated
and helpless, trapped huddled in trenches on the front lines, shell
shock developed over time into “a unifying event” for nations on
both sides of the conflict.18 As details of the disorder were relayed to
the home front in letters, mass media and, later, literary works and
histories, “shell shock” became a shared cultural template for
interpreting the horrors experienced by soldiers, helping to foster
sociopolitical sympathy for veterans.
By the end of the war, approximately 800,000 Britons, 800,000
Frenchmen, and 100,000 Americans had received diagnoses—
numbers far too large for medical professionals to simply dismiss as
malingering.19 To explain these symptoms, many physicians revived
ideas about railway spine stemming from physical jolts to explain
similar symptoms in soldiers exposed to exploding shells. However,
this explanation broke down under scrutiny, as physicians saw
numerous soldiers who had not been in close proximity to explosions
but nevertheless experienced dramatic symptoms. A psychic
explanation was all that remained.
Yet despite the sheer numbers of patients, many political and
military leaders remained skeptical, assuming traumatized soldiers
were feigning symptoms. This created a conundrum for military
psychiatry; undoubtedly, suspicion often led to mistreatment of
traumatized soldiers, but it was not entirely unfounded. Numerous
sources reported that WWI soldiers boasted in private of their ability
to deceive medical officers and leave the front with benefits. Even
Charles Myers, the British physician credited with coining the term
“shell shock,” later questioned his brainchild. Having heard numerous
officers complain about soldiers feigning symptoms to earn a
pension and a “wound stripe,” Myers wrote, “It had proved
impossible to legislate for the bad, without doing injustice to the
good.”20 Physicians scrambled to adapt treatment programs and
diagnostic criteria to support the manpower needs of national
armies. Although by the later years of the war, some shell-shocked
soldiers received psychotherapy, hypnosis, or electric shock
treatment, as well as military pensions after discharge, the lack of
social acceptance meant others were dismissed as “insane” or simply
rebuked by commanders under threats of execution.21 In the war’s
later years, the British, American, and French militaries attempted to
bypass trauma’s long-term impacts by instituting “forward
psychiatry” according to the PIE acronym—treating shell-shock
victims proximate to battle, immediately, with the expectation that
they would return to combat.22 In theory, this standardized wartime
psychiatric care, but in practice, it served what Freud later called “a
role somewhat like that of a machine gun behind the front line, that
of driving back those who fled.”23
After the war, vigorous debate over shell shock’s origins prompted
Freud to reconsider his previous seduction theory of trauma.24
Freud’s new theorization downplayed any sexual roots, envisioning
soldiers’ traumatic symptoms instead as the result of violent,
shocking encounters that disrupted the socially and politically
influenced unconscious psychic shields that maintained stability and
linear memory formation in everyday life. “[F]ixation to the traumatic
accident lives at their root,” Freud wrote. “It is as though these
patients had not yet finished with the traumatic situation.”25 As the
“center of gravity” of Freudian psychoanalysis shifted from Europe to
the United States, this explanation developed into the highly
influential and durable diagnosis of “war neurosis.”26 Indeed, even
though mainstream psychiatry turned away from psychoanalysis in
the 1960s and 1970s,27 Freud’s revision bears a strong resemblance
to the PTSD disorder later codified in diagnostic manuals and
subsequently spread across the globe.28
The interwar period also saw the reintegration and political
awakening of veterans in European and American society, bringing
issues of wartime trauma into mainstream domestic political
discourse. Governments spent massively on pensions for soldiers
with lingering psychiatric issues; by the outbreak of World War II, as
many as 40,000 Britons were still receiving pensions from prior
combat, while the US government’s Veterans Bureau had spent
nearly $1 billion on those with psychiatric illnesses. Yet as the
specter of mass violence once again overtook the globe, the great
powers’ militaries remained unprepared for psychic trauma. The US
military, for example, attempted to avoid issues by screening out
those deemed prone to malingering or psychic impairment. It
contracted psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan to develop tests to
weed out the mentally ill, the maladjusted, and homosexuals, all of
whom the military deemed prone to psychic trauma or threats to
combat readiness. From 1941 to 1944, Sullivan’s methods removed
12 percent of eligible recruits from service, six times the rate during
World War I.29 Nevertheless, these interventions largely failed to
prevent more than a million American military personnel (more than
5 percent of all servicemen) from ending up in psychiatric treatment
facilities, most of which continued to employ the PIE protocol. The
British military similarly suffered more than a million psychiatric
casualties during the war.30 This number overwhelmed resistance
and fomented a notable shift in the military hierarchy’s skepticism of
wartime psychic impairment as either inherited or feigned. In 1943,
the US Army hired psychoanalyst William Menninger to develop a
guide for treating presumably “normal” men who had reached their
psychological “breaking point.”31 Though longer-term treatment
regimens and diagnoses varied considerably, by the war’s end, Allied
militaries had largely adapted to the idea that psychiatric casualties
were inevitable and treatment should focus on returning soldiers to
either combat or civilian life. After World War II, psychiatric patients
constituted approximately 60 percent of those treated by the US
Veterans Administration (VA), with approximately 500,000 receiving
pensions.32
Following World War II and the international intervention in
Korea, which, for a variety of reasons, saw relatively minimal
psychiatric casualties,33 scholarly interest in psychic trauma largely
went dormant during the 1950s and early 1960s. When the
American Psychiatric Association (APA) published its first edition of
the DSM in 1952, it included the relatively vague category of gross
stress reaction (GSR), rather than “war neurosis” or a trauma-
inspired cognate. The definition of GSR explicitly mentioned combat
but described soldiers’ trauma as both temporary and eminently
curable.34 The second edition, published in 1968, removed GSR and
recategorized post-combat symptoms as an “adjustment reaction of
adult life,” which grouped together diverse examples of “transient
situational disturbances,” including an “unwanted pregnancy” or a
soldier merely experiencing “fear” from combat.35 Without the
impetus of a major Western military intervention, recognition of
trauma faded. The next major innovation in trauma’s development—
the advent of the modern PTSD psychiatric diagnosis—again
depended on another international political development, the US war
in Vietnam.36
During the early years of US involvement in Vietnam, reported
rates of psychiatric casualties were strikingly low—approximately ten
times less than in World War II. These figures were unsurprising,
Another random document with
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 “He’s my brother,” I said.
“I don’t care. He wanted to drown me; he didn’t know I can’t die by
water.”
“Can’t you?” I said.
“Of course not. I’m a changeling!”
She said it with a childish seriousness that confounded me.
“What made you one?” I asked.
“The fairies,” she said, “and that’s why I’m here.”
I was too bewildered to pursue the subject further.
“How did you fall in there?” I asked.
“I saw some little fish, like klinkents of rainbow, and wanted to
catch them; then I slipped and soused.”
“Well,” I said, “where are you going now?”
“With you,” she answered.
I offered no resistance. I gave no thought to results, or to what my
father would say when this grotesque young figure should break into
his presence. Mechanically I started for home and she walked by my
side, chatting. Jason strode in our rear, whistling.
“What a brute he must be!” she said once, jerking her head
backward.
“Leave him alone,” I said, “or we shall quarrel. What’s a girl like
you to him?”
I think she hardly heard me, for the whistle had dropped to a very
mellow note. To my surprise I noticed that she was crying.
“I thought changelings couldn’t cry?” I said.
“I tell you water does not affect me,” she answered, sharply. “What
a mean spy you are—for a boy.”
I was very angry at that and strode on with black looks, whereupon
she edged up to me and said, softly: “Don’t be sore with me, don’t.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Let’s kiss and be friends,” she whispered.
For the first time in my life I blushed furiously.
“You beast,” I said, “to think that men would kiss!”
She gave me a sounding smack on the shoulder and I turned on
her furiously.
“Oh, yes!” she cried, “hit out at me, do! It’s like you.”
 “I won’t touch you!” I said. “But I won’t have anything more to do
with you,” and I strode on, fuming. She followed after me and
presently I heard her crying again. At this my anger evaporated and I
turned round once more.
“Come on,” I said, “if you want to, and keep a civil tongue in your
head.”
Presently we were walking together again.
“What’s your home, Renny?” she asked, by and by.
“A mill,” I answered, “but nothing is ground there now.”
She stopped and so did I, and she looked at me curiously, with her
red lips parted, so that her teeth twinkled.
“What’s the matter?” said I.
“Nothing,” she said, “only I remember an old, old saying that the
woman told me.”
“What woman?” I asked, in wonder, but she took no notice of my
question, only repeated some queer doggerel that ran somewhat as
follows:
“Where the mill race is
Come and go faces.
Once deeds of violence;
Now dust and silence.
Thither thy destiny
Answer what speaks to thee.”
 CHAPTER III.
THE MILL AND THE CHANGELING.

The outer appearance of the old mill in which we lived and grew
up I have touched upon; and now I take up my pen to paint in black
and white the old, moldering interior of the shell.
The building stood upon a triple arch of red brick that spanned the
stream, and extended from shore to shore, where, on each side, a
house of later date stood cheek to jowl with it. It looked but an
indifferent affair as viewed from the little bridge aforesaid, which was
dedicated to St. Swithun of watery memory, but in reality extended
further backward than one might have suspected. Moreover, to the
east side a longish wing, with a ridged roof of tiles, ran off at right
angles and added considerably to the general dimensions. To the
west stood a covered yard, where once the mill wagons were packed
or unloaded; but this, in all my memory of it, yawned only a dusty
spave, given over to the echoes and a couple of ancient cart wheels
whose rusty tires and worm-pierced hubs were mute evidence of an
inglorious decay.
These were for all to see—but behind the walls!
Was the old mill uncanny from the first, or is it only the ghosts with
which our generation of passions has peopled it that have made it
so? This I can say: That I never remember a time when Jason or I,
or even Zyp, dared to be in the room of silence alone—and in
company never for more than a few minutes. Modred had not the
same awe of it, but Modred’s imagination was a swaddled infant. For
my father I will not speak. Maybe he was too accustomed to specters
to dread them.
This room was one on the floor above the water, and the fact that
it harbored the mill wheel, whose booming, when in motion, shook
the stagnant air with discordant sounds, may have served as some
explanation of its eeriness. It stood against the east wing and away
from the yard, and was a dismal, dull place, like a loft, with black
beams above going off into darkness. Its only light came from a
square little window in front that was bleared with dust and stopped
outside with a lacework of wire. Against its western wall was reared
a huge box or cage of wood, which was made to contain the upper
half of the wheel, with its ratchet and shaft that went up to the great
stones on the floor above; for the mill race thundered below, and
when the great paddles were revolving the water slapped and rent at
the woodwork.
Now it behooves me to mention a strange fancy of my father’s—
which was this, that though no grain or husk in our day ever
crumbled between the stones, the wheel was forever kept in motion,
as if our fortunes lay in grinding against impalpable time. The custom
was in itself ghostly, and its regularity was interrupted only at odd
moments, and those generally in the night, when, lying abed
upstairs, we boys would become conscious of a temporary cessation
of the humming, vibrating noise that was so habitual to the place. To
this fancy was added a strange solicitude on the part of my father for
the well-being of the wheel itself. He would disappear into the room
of silence twice or thrice a day to oil and examine it, and if rarely any
tinkering was called for we knew it by the sound of the closing of the
sluice and of the water rush swerving round by another channel.
Now, for the time I have said enough, and with a sigh return to that
May afternoon and little Zyp, the changeling.
She followed me into the mill so quietly that I hardly heard her step
behind me. When I looked back her eyes were full of a strange
speculation and her hands crossed on her breast, as if she prayed.
She motioned me forward and I obeyed, marveling at my own
submission. I had no slightest idea what I was to say to my father or
what propose. We found him seated by the table in the living room
upstairs, a bottle and glass before him. The weekly demon was
beginning to work, but had not yet obtained the mastery. He stared
at us as we entered, but said nothing.
Then, to my wonder, Zyp walked straight up to the old man, pulled
his arms down, sat upon his knee and kissed his rutted cheek. I gave
a gasp that was echoed by Jason, who had followed and was
leaning against the lintel of the open door. Still my father said nothing
and I trembled at the ominous silence. At last in desperation I
stammered, and all the time Zyp was caressing the passive face.
 “Dad, the girl fell into the water and I pulled her out, and here she
is.”
Then at length my father said in a harsh, deep voice:
“You pulled her out? What was Jason there doing?”
“Waiting for her to drown,” my brother answered for himself,
defiantly forestalling conviction.
My father put the girl from him, strode furiously across the room,
seized Jason by one arm and gave him several cruel, heavy blows
across his shoulders and the back of his head. The boy was half
stunned, but uttered no cry, and at every stroke Zyp laughed and
clapped her hands. Then, flinging his victim to the floor, from which
he immediately rose again and resumed his former posture by the
door, pale but unsubdued, my father returned to his seat and held
the girl at arm’s length before him.
“Who are you?” he said.
She answered, “A changeling,” in a voice soft as flowers.
“What’s your name?”
“Zyp.”
“Your other name?”
“Never mind; Zyp’s enough.”
“Is it? Where do you come from? What brings you here?”
“Renny brought me here because I love him.”
“Love him? Have you ever met before?”
“No; but he pulled me out of the water.”
“Come—this won’t do. I must know more about you.”
She laughed and put out her hand coaxingly.
“Shall I tell you? A little, perhaps. I am from a big forest out west
there, where wheels drone like hornets among the trees and black
men rise out of the ground. I have no father or mother, for I come of
the fairies. Those who stood for them married late and had a baby
and they delayed to christen it. One day the baby was gone and I
was there. They knew me for a changeling from the first and didn’t
love me. But I lived with them for all that and they got to hate me
more and more. Not a cow died or a gammer was wryed wi’ the
rheumatics but I had done it. Bit by bit the old man lost all his trade
and loved me none the more, I can tell you. He was a Beast Leech,
and where was the use of the forest folk sending for him to mend
their sick kine when he kept a changeling to undo it all? At last they
could stand no more of it and the woman brought me away and lost
me.”
“Lost you?” echoed my father.
“Oh,” said Zyp, with a little cluck, “I knew all along how the tramp
was to end. There was an old one, a woman, lived in the forest, and
she told me a deal of things. She knew me better than them all, and I
loved her because she was evil, so they said. She told me some
rhymes and plenty of other things.”
“Well?” said my father.
“We walked east by the sun for days and days. Then we came to
the top of a big, soft hill, where little beetles were hopping among the
grass, and below us was a great town like stones in a green old
quarry, and the woman said: ‘Run down and ask the name of it while
I rest here.’ And I ran with the wind in my face and was joyful, for I
knew that she would escape when I was gone, and I should never
see her again.”
“And then you tumbled into the water?” said my father.
Zyp nodded.
“And now,” she said, “I belong to nobody, and will you have me?”
My father shook his head, and in a moment sobs most piteous
were shaking the girl’s throat. So forlorn and pretty a sight I have
never seen before or since.
“Well,” he said, “if nobody comes to claim you, you may stop.”
And stop Zyp did. Surely was never an odder coming, yet from
that day she was one of us.
What was truthful and what imaginative in her story I have never
known, for from first to last this was the most we heard of it.
One thing was certain. Zyp was by nature a child of the open air
and the sun. Flowers that were wild she loved—not those that were
cultivated, however beautiful, of which she was indifferent—and she
had an unspeakable imagination in reading their fanciful histories
and a strange faculty for fondling them, as it were, into sentient
beings. I can hardly claim belief when I say that I have seen a rough
nettle fade when she scolded it for stinging her finger, or a little
yellow rock rose turn from the sun to her when she talked to it.
 Zyp never plucked a flower, or allowed us to do so if she could
prevent it. I well remember the first walk I took with her after her
establishment in the mill, when I was attracted by a rare little
blossom, the water chickweed, which sprouted from a grassy trench,
and pulled it for her behoof. She beat me savagely with her soft
hands, then fell to kissing and weeping over the torn little weed,
which actually appeared to revive a moment under her caresses. I
had to promise with humility never to gather another wild flower so
long as I lived, and I have been faithful to my trust.
The afternoon of her coming old Peg rigged her up some
description of sleeping accommodation in a little room in the attic,
and this became her sanctuary whenever she wished to escape us
and be alone. To my father she was uniformly sweet and coaxing,
and he for his part took a strange fancy to her, and abated somewhat
of his demoniacal moodiness from the date of her arrival.
Yet it must not be imagined, from this description of her softer side,
that Zyp was all tender pliability. On the contrary, in her general
relations with us and others as impure human beings, she was the
veritable soul of impishness, and played a thousand pranks to prove
her title to her parentage.
At first she made a feint of distributing her smiles willfully, by turn,
between Modred and me, so that neither of us might claim
precedence. But Jason was admitted to no pretense of rivalry;
though, to do him justice, he at once took the upper hand by meeting
scorn with indifference. In my heart, however, I claimed her as my
especial property; a demand justified, I felt no doubt, by her manner
toward me, which was marked by a peculiar rebellious tenderness
she showed to no other.
The day after her arrival she asked me to take her over the mill
and show her everything. I complied when the place was empty of all
save us. We explored room by room, with a single exception, the
ancient building.
Of course Zyp said: “There’s a room you haven’t shown me,
Renny.”
“Yes,” said I; “the room of silence.”
“Why didn’t we go there?”
“Never mind. There’s something wicked in it.”
 “What? Do tell me! Oh, I should love to see!”
“There’s nothing to see. Let it alone, can’t you?”
“You’re a coward. I’ll get the sleepy boy to show me.”
“Come along then,” I said, and, seizing her hand, dragged her
roughly indoors.
We crossed a dark passage, and, pushing back a heavy door of
ancient timber, stood on the threshold of the room of silence. It was
not in nature’s meaning that the name was bestowed, for, entering,
the full voice of the wheel broke upon one with a grinding fury that
shook the moldering boards of the floor.
“Well,” I whispered, “have you seen enough?”
“I see nothing,” she cried, with a shrill, defiant laugh; “I am going
in”—and before I could stop her, she had run into the middle of the
room and was standing still in the bar of sunlight, with her arms
outspread like wings, and her face, the lips apart, lifted with an
expression on it of eager inquiry.
What happened? I can find an image only in the poison bottle of
the entomologist. As some shining, flower-stained butterfly, slipped
into this glass coffin, quivers, droops its wings and fades, as it were,
in a moment before its capturer’s eyes, so Zyp faded before mine.
Her arms dropped to her sides, her figure seemed as if its whole
buoyancy were gone at a touch, her face fell to a waxen color and
“Oh, take me away!” she wailed in a thin, strangled voice.
I conquered my terror, rushed to her, and, dragging her stumbling
and tripping from the room, banged to the door behind us and made
for the little platform once more and the open air.
She revived in a wonderfully short space of time, and, lifting up her
head, looked into my eyes with her own wide with dismay.
“It was hideous,” she whispered; “why didn’t you stop me?”
Zyp, it will be seen, was not all elf. She had something in common
with her sex.
“I warned you,” I said, “and I know what you felt.”
“It was as if a question was being asked of me,” she said, in a low
voice. “And yet no one spoke and there was no question. I don’t
know what it wanted or what were the words, for there were none;
but I feel as if I shall have to go on thinking of the answer and
struggling to find it forever and ever.”
 “Yes,” I whispered, in the same tone; “that is what everybody
says.”
She begged me not to follow her, and crept away quite humbled
and subdued, and we none of us saw more of her that day. But just
as she left me she turned and whispered in awe-stricken tone,
“Answer what speaks to thee,” and I could not remember when and
where I had heard these words before.
 CHAPTER IV.
ZYP BEWITCHES.

In the evening Dr. Crackenthorpe paid us a visit. He found my

father out, but elected to sit with us and smoke his pipe expectant of
the other’s return.
He always treated us boys as if we were so much dirt, and we
respected his strength just sufficiently to try no pranks on him in the
absence of the ruling power. But nevertheless we resented his
presumption of authority, and whenever he sat with us alone made
an exaggerated affectation of being thick in whispered confidences
among ourselves.
Zyp was still upstairs and the doctor had not as yet seen her, but
he was conscious, I think, in some telepathic way, of an alien
presence in the house, for he kept shifting his position uneasily and
looking toward the door. A screech from his lips suddenly startled us,
and we turned round to see the long man standing bolt upright, with
his face gone the color of a meal sack, and his bold eyes staring
prominent.
“What’s the matter?” said Jason.
Gradually the doctor’s face assumed a dark look of rage.
“Which of you was it?” he cried in a broken voice; “tell me, or I’ll
crack all your fingers up like fire sticks!”
“What’s the matter?” said Jason, again; “you see for yourself
we’ve been sitting by the table all the time you’ve been there.”
“Something spoke—somebody, I tell you, as I sat here in the
chimney corner!” He was beside himself with fury and had great ado
to crush his emotion under. But he succeeded, and sat down again
trembling all over.
“A curse is on the house!” he muttered; then aloud: “I’ve had
enough of your games, you black vermin! I won’t stand it, d’ye hear?
Let there be an end!”
We stared, dropped into our seats and were beginning our
confidences once more, when the doctor started up a second time
with a loud oath, and leaped into the middle of the room.
“Great thunder!” he shouted; “d’ye dare!”
This time we had all heard it—a wailing whisper that seemed to
come from the neighborhood of the chimney and to utter the words:
“Beware the demon that sits in the bottle,” and of the whole company
only I was not confounded.
As to the doctor, he suddenly turned very white again, and
muttered shakingly: “Can it be? I don’t exceed as others do. I swear I
have taken less this month than ever before.”
With the terror in his soul he stumbled toward the door and was
moving out his hand to reach it, when it opened from the other side
and Zyp, as meek and pure looking as a young saint, met him on the
threshold.
Now, I had that morning, in the course of conversation with the
changeling, touched upon Dr. Crackenthorpe and his weaknesses,
and that ghostly mention of the bottle convinced me on the moment
that only she could be responsible for the mystery—a revelation of
impishness which, I need not say, delighted me. The method of her
prank I may as well describe here. The embrasure for a fireplace in
her room had never been fitted with a grate, and the hearthstone
itself was cracked and dislocated in a dozen places. By removing
some of these fragments she had actually discovered a broken way
into the chimney of the sitting room below, down which it was easy to
slip a hollow rail of iron which with other lumber lay in the attic. This
she had done, listened for her opportunity, and thereupon spoken
the ominous words.
I think her appearance was the consummation of the doctor’s
terror, for a shuddering “Oh!” shook from his lips, and he seemed
about to drop. And indeed she was somewhat like a spirit, with her
wild white face looking from a tangle of pheasant-brown hair and her
solemn eyes like water glints in little wells of shadow.
She walked past the stricken man all stately, and then Modred and
I jumped up and greeted her. At this the doctor’s jaw dropped, but
his trembling ceased and he watched us with injected eyes. Holding
my two hands, Zyp looked coyly round, leaning backward.
“I love a tall man,” she whispered; “he has more in him than a
short one.”
 The doctor pulled himself together and came straggling across to
the table.
“Who the pestilence is this?” he said, in a voice not yet quite under
his command.
Zyp let go my hands and curtsied like a wild flower.
“Zyp, the orphan, good gentleman,” she said; “shall I fill your pipe
for you?”
It had fallen on the floor by the chimney, and she picked it up and
went to him with a winning expression.
“Where is your tobacco, please?”
Mechanically he brought a round tin box from his pocket and
handed it to her. Then it was a study in elfin coquetry to see the way
in which she daintily coaxed the weed into the bowl and afterward
sucking at the pipe stem with her determined little red lips to see if it
drew properly. This done, she presented the mouthpiece to the
doctor’s consideration, as if it were a baby’s “comforter.”
“Now,” she said, “sit down and I’ll bring you your glass.”
But at this the four of us, including Dr. Crackenthorpe, drew back.
My father was no man to allow his pleasures to be encroached upon
unbidden, and we three, at least, knew it as much as our skins were
worth to offer practical hospitality in his absence.
Zyp looked at our faces and stamped her foot lively, with a toss of
disdain.
“Where is the strong drink?” she said.
Modred tittered. “In that cupboard over the mantel shelf, if you
must know,” he said.
Zyp had the bottle out in a twinkling and a glass with it. She
poured out a stiff rummer, added water from a stone bottle on a
corner shelf, and presented the grateful offering to the visitor, who
had reseated himself by the table.
His scruples of conscience and discretion grew faint in the near
neighborhood of the happy cordial. He seized the glass and
impulsively took half the grog at a breath. Zyp clapped her hands
joyfully, whereupon he clumped down the glass on the table with a
dismayed look.
“Well,” he said, “you’re an odd little witch, upon my word. What
Robin Goodfellow fathered you, I should like to know?”
 “He’s no father,” said Zyp. “He’s too full of tricks for a family man. I
could tell you things of him.”
“Tell us some then,” said the doctor.
What Zyp would have answered I don’t know, for at that moment
my father walked into the room. If he had had what is vulgarly called
a skinful, he was not drunk, for he moved steadily up to the little
group at the table with a scowl contracting his forehead. The half-
emptied tumbler had caught his eye immediately and he pointed to it.
I was conscious that the doctor quaked a little.
“Pray make yourself at home,” said my father, and caught up the
glass and flung its contents in the other’s face. In a moment the two
men were locked in a savage, furious embrace, till, crashing over a
chair, they were flung sprawling on the floor and apart. Before they
could come together again Zyp alone of us had placed herself
between them, fearless and beautiful, and had broken into a quaint
little song:
“Smooth down her fur,
Rub sleep over her eyes,
Sweet, never stir.
Kiss down the coat of her
There, where she lies
On the bluebells.”
She sung, and whether it was the music or the strangeness of the
interruption, I shall never know; only the wonderful fact remains that,
with the sound of her voice, the great passion seemed to die out of
the two foes and to give place to a pleasant conceit, comical in its
way, that they had only been rollicking together.
“Well,” said my father, without closer allusion to his brutality, “the
liquor was choice Schiedam, and it’s gone.”
He sat down, called for another glass, helped himself to a noggin
and pushed the bottle roughly across to Dr. Crackenthorpe, who had
already reseated himself opposite.
“Sing again, girl,” said my father, but Zyp shook her head.
“I never do anything to order,” she said, “but the fairies move me to
dance.”
 She blew out the lamp as she spoke and glided to a patch of light
that fell from the high May moon through the window on to the rough
boards of the room. Into this light she dipped her hands and then
passed them over her hair and face as though she were washing
herself in the mystic fountain of the night; and all the time her
murmuring voice accompanied the action in little trills of laughter and
words not understandable. Presently she fell to dancing, slowly at
first and dividing her presence between glow and gloom; but
gradually the supple motion of her body increased, step by step, until
she was footing it as wildly as a young hamadryad to her own
leaping shadow on the floor.
Suddenly she sprung from the moonlit square, danced over to Dr.
Crackenthorpe and, whispering awfully in his ear, “Beware the
demon that sits in the bottle,” ran from the room.
My father burst into a fit of laughter, but I think from that day the
doctor fully hated her.
 CHAPTER V.
A TERRIBLE INTERVIEW.

Zyp had been with us a month, and surely never did changeling
happen into a more congenial household.
Jason she still held at arm’s length, which, despite my admiration
of my brother, I secretly congratulated my heart on, for—let me get
over it at the outset—from first to last, I have never wavered in my
passion of love for this wild, beautiful creature. The unexpectedness
of her coming alone was a romance, the delight of which has never
palled upon me with the deadening years. Therefore it was that I
early made acquaintance with the demon of jealousy, than whom
none, in truth, is more irresistible in his unclean strength and
hideousness.
Zyp and I were one day wandering under the shadow of the
mighty old cathedral of Winton.
“I don’t like it, Renny,” she said, pressing up close to me. “It’s awful
and it’s grand, but there are always faces at the windows when I look
up at them.”
“Whose?” I said, with a laugh.
“I don’t know,” she said; “but think of the thousands of old monks
and things whose home it was once and whose ghosts are shut up
among the stones. There!” she cried, pointing.
I looked at the old leaded window she indicated, but could see
nothing.
“His face is like stone and he’s beckoning,” she whispered. “Oh,
come along, Renny”—and she dragged me out of the grassy yard
and never stopped hurrying me on till we reached the meadows.
Here her gayety returned to her, and she felt at home among the
flowers at once.
Presently we wandered into a grassy covert against a hedge on
the further side of which a road ran, and threw ourselves among the
“sauce alone” and wild parsley that grew there. Zyp was in one of
her softest moods and my young heart fluttered within me. She
leaned over me as I sat and talked to me in a low voice, with her fair
young brow gone into wrinkles of thoughtfulness.
“Renny, what’s love that they talk about?”
I laughed and no doubt blushed.
“I mean,” she said, “is it blue eyes and golden hair or brown eyes
and brown hair? Don’t be silly, little boy, till you know what I mean.”
“Well, what do you mean, Zyp?”
“I want to know, that’s all. Renny, do you remember my asking to
kiss and be friends that day we first met, and your refusing?”
“Yes, Zyp,” I stammered.
“You may kiss me now, if you like,” and she let herself drop into my
arms, as I sat there, and turned up her pretty cheek to my mouth.
My blood surged in my ears. I was half-frightened, but all with a
delicious guilt upon me. I bent hastily and touched the soft pink curve
with my trembling lips.
She lay quite still a moment, then sat up and gently drew away
from me.
“No,” she said, “that isn’t it. Shall I ever know, I wonder?”
“Know what, Zyp?”
“Never mind, for I shan’t tell you. There, I didn’t mean to be rude,”
and she stroked the sleeve of my jacket caressingly.
By and by she said: “I wonder if you will suffer, Renny, poor boy? I
would save you all if I could, for you’re the best of them, I believe.”
Her very words were so inexplicable to me that I could only sit and
stare at her. I have construed them since, with a knife through my
heart for every letter.
As we were sitting silent a little space, steps sounded down the
road and voices with them. They were of two men, who stopped
suddenly, as they came over against us, hidden behind the hedge,
as if to clinch some argument, but we had already recognized the
contrary tones of my father and Dr. Crackenthorpe.
“Now, harkee!” the doctor was saying; “that’s well and good, but
I’m not to be baffled forever and a day, Mr. Ralph Trender. What
does it all amount to? You’ve got something hidden up your sleeve
and I want to know what it is.”
“Is that all?” My father spoke in a set, deep manner.
“That’s all, and enough.”
 “Then, look up my sleeve, Dr. Crackenthorpe—if you can.”
“I don’t propose to look. I suggest that you just shake it, when no
doubt the you-know-whats will come tumbling out.”
“And if I refuse?”
“There are laws, my friend, laws—iniquitous, if you like; but, for
what they are, they don’t recognize the purse on the highway as the
property of him that picks it up.”
“And how are you going to set these laws in motion?”
“We’ll insert the end of the wedge first—say in some public print,
now. How would this look? We have it on good authority that Mr.
Trender, our esteemed fellow-townsman, is the lucky discoverer of
——”
“Be silent, you!” My father spoke fiercely; then added in a low tone:
“D’ye wish all the world to know?”
“Not by any means,” said the other, quietly, “and they shan’t if you
fall in with my mood.”
“If I only once had your head in the mill wheel,” groaned my father,
with a curse. “Now, harken! I don’t put much value on your threat; but
this I’ll allow that I court no interference with my manner of life. Take
the concession for what it is worth. Come to me by and by and you
shall have another.”
“A couple,” said the doctor.
“Very well—no more, though I rot for it—and take my blessing with
them.”
“When shall I come?” said the doctor, ignoring the very equivocal
benediction.
“Come to-night—no, to-morrow,” said my father, and turning on his
heel strode heavily off toward the town.
I heard the doctor chuckling softly with a malignant triumph in his
note.
I clenched my teeth and fists and would have risen had not Zyp
noiselessly prevented me. It was wormwood to me; the revelation
that, for some secret cause, my father, the strong, irresistible and
independent, was under the thumb of an alien. But the doctor walked
off and I fell silent.
On our homeward way we came across Jason lying on his back
under a tree, but he took no notice of us nor answered my call, and
Zyp stamped her foot when I offered to delay and speak to him.
Nevertheless I noticed that more than once she looked back, as long
as he was in view, to see if he was moved to any curiosity as to our
movements, which he never appeared to be in the least.
Great clouds had been gathering all the afternoon, and now the
first swollen drops of an advancing thunderstorm spattered in the
dust outside the yard. Inside it was as dark as pitch, and I had
almost to grope my way along the familiar passages. Zyp ran away
to her own den.
Suddenly, with a leap of the blood, I saw that some faintly pallid
object stood against the door of the room of silence as I neared it. It
was only with an effort I could proceed, and then the thing detached
itself and was resolved into the white face of my brother Modred.
“Is that you, Renny?” he said, in a loud, tremulous voice.
“Yes,” I answered, very shakily myself. “What in the name of
mystery are you doing there?”
“I feel queer,” he said. “Let’s get to the light somewhere.”
We made our way to the back, opened the door leading on to the
little platform and stood looking at the stringed rain. Modred’s face
was ghastly and his eyes were awakened to an expression that I had
never thought them capable of.
“You’ve been in there?” I said.
“Yes,” he whispered.
“More fool you. If you like to tempt the devil you should have the
brass to outface him. Why, you’ve got it!” I cried, for he suddenly let
fall from his trembling hand a little round glittering object, whose
nature I could not determine in the stormy twilight.
He had it in his clutch again in a moment, though I pounced for it,
and then he backed through the open doorway.
“It’s naught that concerns you,” he said; “keep off, you beast!”
“What is it?” I cried.
“Water-parings,” said he, and clapped to the door in my face as I
rushed at him, and I heard him scuttle upstairs. The latch caught me
in the chest and knocked my breath out for a bit, so that I was unable
to follow, and probably he ran and bolted himself into his bedroom. In
any case, I had no mind for pursuit, my heart being busy with other
affairs; and there I remained and thought them out. Presently, being
well braced to the ordeal, I went indoors and upstairs to the living
room, where I was persuaded I should find my father. And there he
sat, pretty hot with drink and with a comfortless, glowering devil in
his eyes.
“Well!” he thundered, “what do you want?”
I managed to get out, with some firmness, “A word with you, dad,”
though his eyes disquieted me.
“Make it one, then, and a quick one!”
“Zyp and I were sitting behind a hedge this afternoon when you
and Dr. Crackenthorpe were at words on the other side.”
His eyes shriveled me, but the motion of his lips seemed to signify
to me that I was to go on.
“Dad, if he has any hold over you, let me share the bother and
help if I can.”
He had sat with his right hand on the neck of the bottle from which
he had been drinking, and he now flung the latter at me, with a snarl
like that of a mad dog. Fortunately for me, in the very act some flash
of impulse unnerved him, so that the bottle spun up to the ceiling and
crashed down again to the floor, from which the scattered liquor sent
up a pungent, sickening odor. Then he leaped to his feet and yelled
at me. I could make nothing of his words, save that they clashed into
one another in a torrent of furious invective. But in the midst his
voice stopped, with a vibrating snap; he put his hand to his forehead,
which, I saw with horror, was suddenly streaked with purple, and
down he sunk to the floor in a heap.
I was terribly frightened, and, running to him, endeavored in a
frantic manner to pull him into a sitting posture. I had half succeeded,
when, lying propped up against the leg of the table, he gave a groan
and bade me in a weak voice to let him be; and presently to my joy I
saw the natural color come back to his face by slow degrees. By and
by he was able to slide into the chair he had left, where he lay
panting and exhausted, but recovering.
“Renalt, my lad,” he said, in a dragging voice, “what was that you
said just now? Let’s have it again.”
I hesitated, but he smiled at me and bade me not to fear. Thus
encouraged, I repeated my statement.
“Ah,” he said; “and the girl—did she hear?”
 “She couldn’t help it, dad. But she can’t have noticed much, for
she never even referred to it afterward.”
“Which looks bad, and so much for your profound knowledge of
the sex.”
He looked at me keenly for some moments from under his matted
eyebrows; then muttered as if to himself:
“Here’s a growing lad, and loyal, I believe. What if I took him a
yard into my confidence?”
“Oh, yes, dad,” I said, eagerly. “You can trust me, indeed you can.
I only want to be of some use.”
He slightly shook his head, then seemed to wake up all of a
sudden.
“There,” he said; “be off, like a good boy, and don’t worry me a
second time. You meant well, and I’m not offended.”
“Yes, dad,” I said a little sadly, and was turning to go, when he
spoke to me again:
“And if the girl should mention this matter—you know what—to
you, say what I tell you now—that Dr. Crackenthorpe thinks your
father can tell him where more coins are to be found like the one I
gave him that night; but that your father can’t and is under no
obligation to Dr. Crackenthorpe—none whatever.”
So I left him, puzzled, a little depressed, but proud to be the
recipient of even this crumb of confidence on the part of so reserved
and terrible a man.
Still I could not but feel that there was something inconsistent in
his words to me and those I had heard him address to the doctor.
Without a doubt his utterances on the road had pointed to a certain
recognition of the necessity of bribing the other to silence.