Even though a country is defeated,
Its mountains and rivers remain.
And o’er the castle ruins, when it is spring,
The grass will be green again.
– Tu Fu
Rancor is English’s strongest term for our most lethal feeling: deepest malignity, entrenched and implacable malice, and inveterate enmity.
As war, in penultimate expression it spills over our lives ever past, ever, now and, it seems, evermore.
There are many angry people on the Internet. You’ll find them dropping insults as comments to blogs or sprinkling irascible posts on forums – and when their keyboards fall silent, they spread vitriol by any medium.
They are testament to the fractious spirit of humankind that sees strangers trading gestures, not understanding, or presenting backs to the unfortunate, not empathy, or nations marching idealistic youth to death while non-combatants feign ignorance of delusional leadership.
The idea that ordinary people forced to fight (too often by political cowards who lead from a desk) are capable of shining courage … or dark holocaust. What has it done to our history, and to confidence in our humanity?
If I thought it an unrighteous war I would say so. .. I would not voluntarily march under this country’s flag, nor any other, when it was my private judgment that the country was in the wrong. “
If the country obliged me to shoulder the musket I could not help myself, but I would never volunteer. To volunteer would be the act of a traitor to myself, and consequently traitor to my country. If I refused to volunteer, I should be called a traitor, I am well aware of that—but that would not make me a traitor. The unanimous vote of the [U.S. population] could not make me a traitor. “
I should still be a patriot, and, in my opinion, the only one in the whole country.”
~ Mark Twain
Fearful is the thought that a cultural empire – deemed noble and just in the texts read to children – is found selfish, greedy, brutal, and foully-murderous at that moment in conflict when such nobility is most desperately necessary.
WAR, n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity. "In time of peace prepare for war" has a deeper meaning than is commonly discerned; it means that the soil of peace is thickly sown with the seeds of war and singularly suited to their germination and growth.
- Ambrose Bierce
Coleridge in context has cold advice and a dismal reality:
Let us have a little less of "hands across the sea," and a little more of that elemental distrust that is the security of nations. War loves to come like a thief in the night; professions of eternal amity provide the night.
- Samuel Coleridge
Marcel Caux waited till his 99th year to admit being an Australian survivor of the Great War (1914-1918):
I just murdered, I s’pose. I just murdered people living. It was a horrid, horrid combination of murder .. and murder – and all sorts of things going on that shouldn’t be going on. It was then I realized I was depriving children of their fathers.
War. Not much to be said for it.
A mound of summer grass:
Are warriors’ heroic deeds
Only dreams that pass?
– Sora
