Under the Nets: The Long Road Towards the Front

By Matthew Parish

Friday 25 September 2026

The road towards the front is long, and the closer we get the less anybody in the van has to say. We started with the usual conversation of a road journey, but gradually it has faded away. The van is large and heavily loaded, its rear stacked almost to the roof with boxes of humanitarian aid for civilians living close to the fighting. Every pothole produces a succession of thumps and rattles behind us. Ahead there is the road, increasingly empty except for military vehicles, and above us there are the nets.

They begin almost casually. At first there is a short stretch of netting suspended over the road, then another. Before long we are driving through what feels like an enormous improvised tunnel. The nets are intended to provide some protection against FPV drones, and their presence changes the atmosphere inside the vehicle immediately. Whatever geographical distance may remain between us and the fighting, psychologically we have crossed a boundary.

The mesh flickers above the windscreen as we drive beneath it. Sometimes it is taut and orderly, sometimes ragged and sagging, repaired where sections have apparently been damaged. Looking forward, the road seems to disappear beneath successive layers of netting. Looking sideways, there are fields, trees and occasional houses. It might almost be an ordinary rural drive were it not for the strange artificial ceiling above us and the military traffic roaring past.

The checkpoints come regularly. After a while they become part of the rhythm of the journey: slow down, approach the soldiers, exchange a few words, wait for the gesture and continue. There are checkpoints every few kilometres along parts of the route, each one another reminder that we are moving through a landscape organised around war. The soldiers look into the van and see what we are carrying. We are waved onwards.

We have bottles of water with us, and we give some to the soldiers as we pass. It is an absurdly small gesture in the circumstances, but one that seems to matter. A bottle is handed out through the window, there is a brief exchange of thanks, perhaps a tired smile, and then the soldier steps back and waves us through. The barrier recedes in the mirror and the van accelerates again beneath the nets.

There is something profoundly human about these encounters. The men standing at the checkpoints are performing a military function, but they are also simply men standing beside a road for hours, often in uncomfortable conditions, watching an endless succession of vehicles. Water is water. There is no symbolism necessary. Somebody is thirsty, somebody else has a spare bottle and for a few seconds the immense machinery of war contracts into the most elementary transaction between human beings.

Then another military vehicle comes hammering along the adjacent road. The sound arrives before the vehicle itself: a deep mechanical roar, growing rapidly louder. Trucks, armoured vehicles and other military traffic pass at speed, throwing up dust from the road margins. Nobody turns to stare for very long. Near the front, curiosity about military movements is neither particularly useful nor particularly appropriate. They are going somewhere. So are we.

The petrol stations are worse.

A filling station is such a familiar object that seeing one destroyed produces an unexpectedly powerful reaction. We pass forecourts where the glass has gone from the buildings and the structures behind the pumps have been ripped open. Roofs and canopies are damaged or twisted. Signs remain standing beside buildings that no longer perform the function advertised upon them. The architecture of everyday life has been violently interrupted.

There is no need to ask what happened. Something hit them. Perhaps the people working there had already left. Perhaps they had not. We do not know, and the road does not volunteer explanations. We drive past.

This is how the journey increasingly feels: evidence without narrative. A damaged building. A burnt structure. A deserted forecourt. A stretch of road beneath anti-drone netting. Another checkpoint. Another soldier. Another bottle of water passed through the window. Another wave of the hand telling us to continue.

Inside the van, the boxes behind us have acquired a different significance. When they were being loaded, they were merely boxes. They were heavy, awkward things that had to be fitted together efficiently so that as much as possible could be carried. Now, as we travel deeper into this landscape, their purpose becomes more immediate. Somewhere ahead are people who need what is inside them.

The supplies are mostly ordinary things: food, water, hygiene products and the other necessities from which civilian life is constructed. None of them looks particularly impressive. There is nothing heroic about a packet of food or a bottle of shampoo. Yet the closer we travel towards the front, the more obvious it becomes that civilisation consists to a remarkable degree of ensuring that ordinary things remain available.

There are still civilians here. That is perhaps the strangest aspect of the journey for anyone accustomed to imagining a front line as a clean boundary between war and peace. There is no such boundary. We pass houses with people living in them. There are gardens, bicycles, dogs and washing. An elderly person walks along a road beneath the same nets intended to stop an FPV drone. Life and war have become superimposed upon one another.

One begins to understand why people remain. From hundreds or thousands of kilometres away, it is easy to ask why civilians do not simply leave. Here the question seems almost naïve. Leave for where? Leave the house that represents everything you have accumulated over a lifetime? Leave the animals? Leave elderly relatives? Leave the village where everybody knows you for a city where you may have neither money nor accommodation nor work?

Some will leave eventually. Some will remain until circumstances make remaining impossible. Others will never leave at all. Our job is not to resolve those decisions for them. We are carrying supplies.

Another checkpoint appears ahead. The van slows again.

A soldier approaches. There is a brief conversation. We hand him water. He looks at the boxes in the back and then at us. A hand goes up, the road opens and we move onwards.

After enough of these encounters, the checkpoints cease to feel like interruptions and become punctuation marks in the journey. They measure our progress towards somewhere we cannot yet see. Between them are stretches of damaged road, villages and occasional ruins. Above everything is the netting.

The nets are perhaps the most extraordinary feature of all because they reveal how profoundly warfare has changed. Once, distance from the trenches provided a relatively comprehensible measure of danger. Now a small machine with a camera can travel across fields and along roads in search of a target. A pilot may be nowhere visible. The threat is not announced by the appearance of an aircraft overhead. It may arrive low and fast, almost without warning.

So people have responded with nets.

There is something almost medieval about the solution. Against cameras, radio links, fibre-optic cables, electric motors and sophisticated explosives, somebody has erected poles and stretched mesh across the road. Twenty-first-century technology meets the principle of the fishing net. The result is this extraordinary covered landscape through which soldiers, ambulances, humanitarian volunteers and civilians continue to travel.

The passengers in our van understand what the nets signify. Nobody is panicking. Fear in places like this rarely resembles fear in films. It manifests itself instead as concentration. People look out of the windows more often. They notice where the vehicle is. They become attentive to unusual sounds. Jokes become shorter and silences longer.

The closer we get, the more absurd the language of geopolitics begins to seem. In distant capitals people discuss escalation, deterrence, strategy and negotiating positions. All these things matter. But they are not what the war looks like from inside this van.

From here the war looks like a soldier accepting a bottle of water. It looks like a petrol station with its windows blown out. It looks like an old woman living beneath a road network covered in nets because flying machines might otherwise hunt vehicles travelling along it. It looks like cardboard boxes stacked behind us containing things that somebody needs. And it sounds like military vehicles roaring past while our own van continues towards the front.

We pass another checkpoint and another bottle of water goes through the window. The soldier waves. We wave back. For a moment everyone smiles, and then we are moving again. The nets continue above us. The road continues ahead. Nobody in the van says very much now because there is not much that needs saying. We know where we are going and why.

The boxes rattle behind us as we drive on.