The miserable, wretched truth is that almost nothing went right for Roméo Dallaire from beginning to end. Only superhuman determination and self-discipline saw him through, and those were clearly stretched beyond the breaking point, given the personal toll that was exacted. I can’t imagine how the man is still vertical. He suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder—he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t suffer from some debilitating condition.

Apart from all the anecdotes and the detailed documentation in the book that enhance our knowledge and bring the history to life, what is riveting is the descent into depravity surrounding Dallaire, and the hostile, incomparably venal personalities with whom he had to deal throughout those hallucinatory hundred days. Dallaire looked out his window and evil looked him back.

The most upsetting passages are undoubtedly the descriptive scenes of horror. They come at you like heat-seeking missiles, finding their target, leaving you gasping for breath:

We saw many faces of death during the genocide… For a long time I completely wiped the death masks of raped and sexually mutilated girls and women from my mind as if what had been done to them was the last thing that would send me over the edge. But if you looked you could see the evidence, even in the whitened skeletons. The legs bent and apart. A broken bottle, a rough branch, even a knife between them. Where the bodies were fresh, we saw what must have been semen pooled on and near the dead women and girls. There was always a lot of blood. Some male corpses had their genitals cut off, but many women and young girls had their breasts chopped off and their genitals crudely cut apart. They died in a position of total vulnerability, flat on their backs, with their legs bent and knees wide apart. It was the expression on their dead faces that assaulted me the most, a frieze of shock, pain and humiliation. For many years after I came home, I banished the memories of those faces from my mind, but they have come back, all too clearly.

Is it any wonder that Dallaire staggers through life? In chapter after chapter, throughout the period of the actual genocide, there are massacres in churches; the mortar bombing of hospitals; the casual killing of children; bodies floating in the river; the checking of documents at a thousand barricades leading to arbitrary death on the spot (rather like Mengele on the railway tracks, calmly pointing ‘left’ or ‘right’ as people were dispatched to the ovens); mass graves; the skeletal remains by the roadside; the murder of families while they were literally on the phone with unamir, pleading for protection. Dallaire doesn’t overdo it. Nor does he underdo it. But, by the time you’ve reached the finale, there is a full, aching realization of what really happened. Day by terrifying day.

There are two things about the book that I could not have anticipated. First, there is the startling chronology. Dallaire and his aides kept notes, sometimes by the hour. No other work on the Rwandan genocide that I know of is so meticulous in its exposition of events, of individual moments in time. The book is an intense, all-consuming personal diary, with no pages left blank.

Second, and more important, the book reveals how Dallaire’s every en-treaty was rejected time and time and time again. I had no idea. I knew that he tried desperately to make his case, to engage the New York authorities, to raise alarms, to rally the world. But I never imagined that he did it on an almost daily basis, and hit a brick wall of indifference, repudiation, contempt or silence with annihilating regularity. The worst, the absolute worst was the refusal of New York—during the first week, as the insane destruction spread throughout the land—to allow Dallaire to protect the local Rwandan population. When Iqbal Riza finally relents, after thousands upon thousands are dead, Dallaire writes: “I felt sickened as I read [the cable].”

The exasperating, helpless struggle took its toll. Slowly, inexorably, Roméo Dallaire unravels. It’s not just what he sees; it’s the sense of failure and the guilt of personal responsibility that he carries. He’s not personally responsible in any way, of course. In fact, you get the strong feeling that he, almost alone, moved heaven and earth in an attempt to prevent the catastrophe. But the failure wore him down. And then the nightmares took over. He was evacuated from Rwanda in August, 1994.

Lt. General Roméo Dallaire is revered by Canadians everywhere. When I finished the book, I could understand why. Here was a man who screamed into the void. No one listened, no one cared, no one heard. But he never stopped screaming. He valued every human life. He wept for every human loss. He never gave up.

There is a final chapter entitled “Conclusion.” It’s a touching chapter, a trifle naïve perhaps, combined with a reluctance to blame, and a search for solutions. Roméo Dallaire wants to believe, with all his heart, that Rwanda was some terrible aberration, that the world would never permit it again. Though he’s fairly hard-headed about the problems of a world that spawn terrorism and genocide, he’s a little too trusting. Still, it’s wonderful to think that a man who has been through the inferno, and who has been so palpably betrayed, still carries with him a sense of hope, even optimism.