![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julesjonesWe observed the Armistice silence at work today. We heard the crack of the signal mortar from the town hall, and then there was no sound at all inside the building. Just the occasional car outside, and the sound of the town hall clock striking eleven. One hundred years ago the deaths had already started, and would go on for another four years.
I am not a pacifist. I know too many survivors of the Nazi death camps to think that war is always the worst option. But it is never a good option, only sometimes the least bad option, and the Great War was nothing more or less than a butcher's shop for no good purpose. In this year of all years, that the British Legion should choose to create a butchered version of Eric Bogle's haunting song "No Man's Land"/"The Green Fields of France" to promote the Poppy Appeal, that they twisted it by censoring the final two verses to scrub away the song's anti-war message -- they show themselves as being more concerned with a jingoistic message about Our Glorious Dead than with truly remembering what the dead died for, and that sometimes it was for nothing at all.
I am not a pacifist. I know too many survivors of the Nazi death camps to think that war is always the worst option. But it is never a good option, only sometimes the least bad option, and the Great War was nothing more or less than a butcher's shop for no good purpose. In this year of all years, that the British Legion should choose to create a butchered version of Eric Bogle's haunting song "No Man's Land"/"The Green Fields of France" to promote the Poppy Appeal, that they twisted it by censoring the final two verses to scrub away the song's anti-war message -- they show themselves as being more concerned with a jingoistic message about Our Glorious Dead than with truly remembering what the dead died for, and that sometimes it was for nothing at all.
He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.
He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.