24 Festive Tasks: Door 17 – Veterans’ / Armistice Day, Task 1:
Post a quote or a piece of poetry about the ravages of war.
Here are three quotes from E.M. Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front:
“Comrade, I did not want to kill you. . . . But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. … I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades — words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”
“It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.”
… as well as this one, very much in the same vein as the last one above, by Thomas Mann:
“War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”
