Geneva, spring 1638
The Thirty Years War has now been running for twenty years and there is no longer a city in the German lands that does not carry visible evidence of what twenty years of religiously motivated mass violence produces. A third of the German population is dead. I have been through the conflict zone four times in the past decade, moving documents and, when I can, people.
Geneva is neutral, which makes it useful. I have been based here for the past year, moving through the city’s quiet streets between operations that are anything but quiet. The network is held together by trust and by the shared understanding, among the people in it, that the only response to this particular scale of human failure is the unglamorous, unremarked work of carrying what can be carried across lines that are supposed to be impassable.
I have been doing this since the Inquisition. I am not good at it in any heroic sense. I am persistent and patient and I have had enough time to build the networks that make persistence useful. I move manuscripts because I believe that what human beings know collectively is more important than any of the arguments about how they should know it. I move people because they are people.
Last week I helped a family of five cross into Swiss territory carrying nothing but a box of books. The father was a Protestant theologian from Augsburg. He asked me who I was. I told him I was someone with a long memory for useful gaps in lines that should not exist. He accepted this without further questions.