War.
November 7, 2008
As I read through a narrative by a BBC reporter who was visiting a World War I Site in France, the picture used in the article caught my attention. After reading some descriptions of the horrors endured and ruddy life poured from soldiers bodies out into the forest floor the picture of tombstones ran chills through mine.
What caused it wasn’t that the tombstone was eerily covered in slimy green moss, watched over by stone angels and forgotten by time and man. What made me scared was the normalcy of it all. The sterile, anonymous stones plain white, completely bare apart from a cross engraved and a token sentence. It felt like balmy afternoon, like every other day, like a time unassuming and so normal. It terrifies me that someone’s life could pass in such a manner, and be marked in passing by an afterthought, their memory evaporating like leaves from the trees in fall. Here for a moment, and gone forever, like the passing of a flower that no one saw. The fields are full of them, and no matter how brilliant they are perishing in an instant. How much more tragic lives that have been brutally cut short though the rage of aliens, strangers whom they’ve never met, a voice they haven’t heard, all of themselves spent on picking up the receipt for someone else’s bill.
War.
