Oh m
y name is Francis Toliver, I come from Liverpool – 2 years ago the war was waitin’ for me after school
~ Christmas in the Trenches
They were all just kids. They’re always…just kids. They grow up too quickly and they’re taken from us too fast.
100 yeas ago it was supposed to be the war that ended all wars. On this day 100 years ago, people cried and kissed in the street, because it was over….it was finally finally over.
Except then it wasn’t.
Except it never is.
I sometimes wonder if humanity knows how to be at peace, or if we always have some point we have to prove that renders us incapable of simply letting each other be. Instead we send our children to the slaughter, and we have now done it so often that it no longer is cause for celebration when they return, there are no more ticker-tape parades, there are no more “PEACE” headlines in the papers. It just …keeps going.
It’s hard, in that light, to be the lark above the guns, to keep faith.
I still don’t understand, I never will. I understand no more now than I did when I was that little girl standing in her party shoes in the mud. Perhaps I’m not meant to. Perhaps I have simply…become too naïve in thinking that anyone could ever understand it, could ever change it.
But no. I can’t think like that. I won’t. Because for one thing, if I thought like that too long my Gran would come back and haunt me.
People gave up everything. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, they gave up everything. So that we could have what? I’m not sure exactly. But I don’t think they sleep. I don’t think that this…whatever it is we have…I don’t think this is what they wanted. I don’t think they would be happy with us. I don’t think they would be proud. They died to end it all, to end the conflict, stop the bloodshed…and yet…
Today is important because we remember those we’ve lost. They will always deserve that honour, and I will hold to it until the day I go through the veil. But you can remember their sacrifice without upholding the institution that required them to make it.
War has long since proven that it serves nothing. It solves nothing. Death does not stop death.
100 years…it’s long past time to hammer our swords into plowshares…all of us, everywhere, not just in the western world.
Else, they will never rest, and their sacrifice will have been for naught.
But I know that perhaps, that is a dream that is not meant to be..
Just as I know that no one ever will be able to explain “why” to the little girl with the mud on her party shoes in the rain.
I agree with all you said. As long as there is greed and religion, the wars will never stop. I don’t know how to convince people that life and love are more important than anything wars are fought over. I don’t even believe wars are fought these days so we can be free. That said, I will grieve over every life lost to violence, whether war or other ways. I will also hope and pray for sanity to infect the world and a forever-lasting peace to be achieved.