Gray’s Theme, written and composed by Ben Foster.
The Battle of the Amazons by Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1618
War. It is a word contained in the utterest of silence, yet its meaning is anything but silent. Of all the great and wonderful and awful things I have seen of humanity, nothing is, to me, as devastating, as vulgar, and as heartbreaking as war. War is a finality to all things: it is a measure of the bounds of eternity. And, that beauty should find itself alongside war is unfathomable; yet, there it is—a topic so engrossing as to rouse the deepest passion, and deepest disgust, in the hearts of its inheritors.
The feelings evoked by war are, if present, evanescent, but war itself is unfeeling. War removes the capacity to feel. What thing as pure as a human heart could withstand the sights of war? It flees, as if the stench of death had wrung the air from its lungs. It flees, as do the shadows from the burning light.
A section of Guernica by Pablo Picasso, 1937
Perhaps I should not speak of war, when I have only ever known peace, but I have watched from the ivory towers of a presently powerful nation, and I see through the eyes of history some semblance of the terrors of war, and I am moved—though it sickens me to feign to understand it.
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) by Salvidor Dali, 1936
But what is this mysterious depth that war seems to fathom within the heart of humanity? Is war such an integral, essential part of human nature that it finds itself ensnared within the minds of even the most peaceful and tolerant of beings? Do such dark shadows lurk within the recesses of the human soul that no illumination can purge them from the thrones of their kingdom of death?
Bild für die Väter (Picture of the Fathers) by Georg Baselitz, 1965
Must we find death and decay in order to convince ourselves of the meaning of life, and if so, must we do so in such perpetuity?
Nefarious War by Li Po, c. 750
Translated from the Chinese by Shigeyoshi Obata
Last year we fought by the head-stream of the So-Kan,
This year we are fighting on the Tsung-ho road.
We have washed our armor in the waves of the Chiao-chi lake,
We have pastured our horses on Tien-shan’s snowy slopes.
The long, long war goes on ten thousand miles from home.
Our three armies are worn and grown old.
The barbarian does man-slaughter for plowing;
On his yellow sand-plains nothing has been seen but blanched skulls and bones.
Where the Chin emperor built the walls against the Tartars,
There the defenders of Han are burning beacon fires.
The beacon fires burn and never go out.
There is no end to war!—
In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;
The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,
While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,
Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.
So, men are scattered and smeared over the desert grass,
And the generals have accomplished nothing.
Oh, nefarious war! I see why arms
Were so seldom used by the benign sovereigns.
Race Against Death by Franklin Boggs
And still, perhaps we do find something in war—
I don’t know. Is the price worth paying? Is it? And suppose there was a thing to be found, and such a thing was worth the misery and destruction and chaos and deafening cacophony of war, how would it change you? And what would you lose?
Horrendous. War is worthless. War is meaningless. But not all agree on this—and some, perhaps, only too well, though they do nothing—and so we wage war.
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfrid Owen, 1917
Bent double, like of old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind:
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in sonic smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not talk with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Triptych by Otto Dix, c. 1929-1932
We wage war, even in this enlightened age. We watch it on television, we listen to it on the radio. Trickling water, disguising a torrent—a tyrannous typhoon. And what do we chase?! What do we chase, when we pursue our passions into battle? We blindfold the hearts of good men and women, and send them into a terrible cyclone, and avert our gaze, so as not to see what they cannot—what they cannot! else they perish: their hearts torn by the ravaging waves of an unsafe sea.
Crying, for a Child in War by Michael D. Edens, 2008
Why do I hear silence when I think of war? Perhaps my ears could not bear to hear the voice of such a thing. I am vitiated by the fears of my nation—to see, to speak, to hear no evils, whereof the subject pertains to war. And the filters of time do not allow the screams of agony to reach me, either. I am cold—so like a stone, though drenched in blood: a weeping angel.
