4 ideas
Local Biafran officials keep insisting the town is safe right up until shelling forces a panicked flight on foot. After Biafran troops later retake the town, Kate returns to find it looted and destroyed, and she concludes that she must never again accept such a war.
In a besieged society the word 'saboteur' is used against anyone who states an inconvenient fact, such as saying the enemy is near. This makes accurate information socially dangerous to voice. People then perform confidence in public while privately preparing to flee, and the gap between official belief and actual risk grows until collapse comes as a surprise.
The townspeople trust that Ugwuta's lake goddess will shield the town, as she protected it in the past. This faith combines with political propaganda to make leaving seem like betrayal of both nation and deity. The belief works as a mechanism of delay: people stay until evacuation becomes chaotic flight, which raises the civilian cost when the town falls.
Telling the war through a mother's domestic logistics shifts the measure of war away from battles and speeches. What counts instead is food, children's safety, rumours, and where to sleep next. From this vantage, a cause's rhetoric is judged by its material effects on households, and disillusionment arrives through accumulated daily losses rather than a single decisive defeat.