Consular work is perhaps the best example of diplomacy with a human touch, because consular officers touch people’s lives around the world every day, often in moments of great need, trauma or desperation. They serve on the front lines of diplomacy, guarding against threats far away from the home country’s physical borders. They protect those borders through the entry visas they decide to grant or deny, and assist home-country citizens in harm’s way. They provide what are known as cradle-to-grave services, including everything from issuing reports of birth abroad to visiting detained or imprisoned compatriots to issuing death certificates. Consular matters affect every bilateral relationship, and their impact is felt globally. Consular work will test you as an individual, including your ability to empathize while fairly applying laws and procedures.

The chapter asks why an avowed pacifist wrote so many works, not all completely negative, about war. It begins with Tolstoy’s personal connection to the military, through both his family background and his own service. It describes the two wars in which he fought: the Long Caucasian War (1817–64) and the Crimean War of 1853–6, and it explains how he came to write War and Peace about the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. It then turns to other conflicts (the 1877–8 Russo-Turkish War and the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War) and military alliances (among others, the 1891–1917 Franco-Russian Alliance) in which Russia was involved during Tolstoy’s lifetime. Russia had been an empire since the conquest of Kazan in 1552, and all its external wars during Tolstoy’s lifetime were related to imperialism. Tensions with Germany simmered over many years. Finally, the failure after emancipation in 1861 to integrate the peasants into a new, just society created conditions for civil war that intensified in the late 1870s and led to the assassination, in 1881, of Alexander II and the revolution of 1905. The essay summarizes Tolstoy’s reactions to all these different kinds of war and warlike conditions.

This chapter undertakes a systematic review of the literature on memory and transitional justice to provide support for the central premise of the book: that law and memory studies miss each other in transitional justice. In doing so, this thick description of the literature provides the key background for the case studies in other chapters. Further, the chapter examines the regime for the protection of cultural heritage in wartime of the 1954 Hague Convention and its Protocols as a paradigmatic case study of cultural heritage law’s reluctance to engage with transitional efforts. The chapter’s engagement with the idea of anti-anti-politics in the context of the conservation paradigm or the Authorized Heritage Discourse also aligns the book with critical work on the anti-impunity move in the international human rights movement.

As the military and economic situation deteriorated in Germany, so did the military’s ability to respect the pre-war agreements on the humane treatment of prisoners of war. Shortages worsened throughout 1917 and 1918, causing all social classes to feel the effects of the war in the pits of their stomachs. Tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war in Germany had no option but to rely on whatever their captors could feed them. Conditions were dire, but Germany was able to defray some of the long-term costs of feeding prisoners of war by granting some of them access to humanitarian aid from the Red Cross. The food situation at Karlsruhe had become so desperate in 1917 that British officers imprisoned there were offered 30 pfennigs a day to forgo the German-supplied rations so that they could be used to feed starving civilians.

Not all captured Australians survived the tumult of battle. After the 7th Brigade’s failed attack on the Windmill at Pozières on 28 July 1916, a German officer approached an Australian Lewis gunner nursing a bullet wound to his leg. ‘You are the Machine Gunner?’ asked the officer. ‘Yes, sir,’ the man replied. Without hesitation, the officer drew his automatic pistol and shot the man through the heart and the head, killing him instantly. ‘That’s the way to deal with English swine.’