What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

-Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

--Wilfred Owen, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’.

Rows upon rows of silent, white faces greet me as I step softly onto the carpeted earth. They seem to be trying to say something; mute, ragged voices reaching out to me from the bowels of the Earth. But they are growing fainter, softer, further away from me, until all that is left are neat rows of blinding, pristine white, gleaming starkly in the afternoon sun. Standing in the middle of the peaceful hill, one cannot imagine war.

The sprawled limbs torn off some unknown soldier, a finger yanked off its master’s arm, the blood from a bruised and broken corpse slowly sliding down the bare and blackened roots of a dead, scorched tree. The shouts of men in the field, shouting orders to his infantry, the sounds of the ruthless machine gun, tearing into a new, unmarked body, even as his friends behind him mourn another fallen man’s death. The dog-tags tinkling as they hit one another inside the grimy shirts of desperate men, clad in pressed uniforms and gleaming boots; almost a sweet sound amidst war cries and the clashing of two human columns. I look at the neat rows. Mute, unknown faces look back at me, as they must have done so, a long time ago, when faced by their foes. Now there is only me.

And I do not know, or understand.

I went to the Kranji War Cemetery today. Went and saw the gleaming headstones, each with an insignia, and a few words inscribed on it. And whatever remained of the person beneath it.

Ah, the futility of war.

And the apathy of my classmates.

The cemetery, covered in hard stone, seems so peaceful, so quiet; the sort of atmosphere one would encounter on a stroll on a beach. The grass is soft, and the traffic has become an almost silent buzz in the background. There are massive ornate structures everywhere one looks. It is all so peaceful, so beautiful, and calm. But there is also a sense of guilt.

Every time sons are sent to fight in a war, they march off from their homes proudly, waving their hands, flashing big smiles. But we know that when the ragged group comes stumbling back, they will have left half of the force in the battlefields, or strewn somewhere on some island in the middle of an unknown sea. Children are lied to all the time, about how a war is great and how it is a wonderful honour to die for one’s country, and they play ‘war’ during their play time. But we, they, all of us, cannot fathom what a war could possibly be like, because to us, war is a concept that is light years away, which we cannot grasp, and will not understand. To us, war is only something we have gathered and formed a vague notion of, from cnn and bbc, from people’s speeches and games.

Dammit, don’t world leaders ever feel guilty? About all the times when they commanded their troops to continue fighting and this resulted in their deaths? War isn’t about glory or power; one man is just another private, another name in the register, another number of the casualties. Leaders often command without understanding the situation on the ground. The army often cannot be blamed for some atrocities it commits, as their orders come from their leaders. If a country was a body, the army would be its fingers and toes, and sometimes they move because they have to.

But, we human beings, honestly, I don’t understand the human race at all.

Land is just land, it isn’t worth the lives of ten thousand young and deceived men to come to an agreement on it. Weapons; why were they invented in the first place? To watch the death toll climb higher like some sick bastard who has nothing to do? The men you send to war are people, youngsters who had lives ahead of them, some who don’t even know who or what they’re fighting for!

War isn’t about glory; hell, it isn’t even about what you were arguing about in the first place, because isn’t diplomacy just arguing in another circumstance? It’s about the men that people send out to fight, it’s about blood, tears, wounds and death.

Why are humans built so? If we weren’t so greedy, there wouldn’t even have to be fighting to gain peace! Bloody hell, at the rate we’re going, we’ll wipe out half the goddamn population before we even reach a truce that might last a century before another idiot decides a few buildings need blowing up!

In fact, we’ve already started. Afghanistan? Kosovo? Iraq? The Middle East? And doing a fine job while we’re at it too; not leaving a single building untouched!

And what do the soldiers die for? They, the nameless thousands who have worked their guts out, die so a stupid leader of some goddamn country can sign another treaty, or conquer another few kilometres of land. They died so that they could have peace in a grassy field under a tombstone, so that their leaders could have a few years peace before squabbling over some fine detail in that treaty in the near future. They died so another group of sighing, pimply and bored teens could be brought on a boring field trip to their graves, their nameless graves, to roll their eyes over a history and a people they couldn’t care less about.

What does war achieve?

There can never be peace in this world, not at the rate we’re going.

And you can stop telling your children that old lie : Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, because they will die young, and no one but the bullets of a gun will be there are their passing.

The eagle glides calmly overhead, sees this all, and does nothing.

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