What it means to suffer from trauma

"It was terrifying and surreal to be talking to someone... listening to them pleading for help, and being able to do nothing but reassure them that help was on the way - and then to hear screams, shots and the silence of a dead line."

The man who recounted those extraordinary moments was Mr Romeo Dallaire, a lieutenant-general in the Canadian army and the commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda in 1994. In April of that year, the Hutus embarked on a genocidal massacre of the minority Tutsi. Mr Dallaire and his force of about 500 men became hapless witnesses of the bloodbath that left about a million people dead. Hutus set upon their Tutsi neighbours with household tools and homemade weapons - machetes and hoes, hammers and clubs. In his memoir, Mr Dallaire wrote of seeing bodies piled onto trucks and "blood, dark, half-coagulated, oozed like thick paint from the back of them". He recalled a rat that had grown so big and fat on the flesh of the dead that his men thought it was a terrier.