Silence the Songs of Conquest

 

Lay Down Arms, and Also Attitudes

The world has grown no wiser, only louder in its folly. History crackles with warnings in a thousand tongues—yet, today we hear with agony,   voices from the mud and ruin of the trenches. We are, still fashioning boys into soldiers and homes into tombs.

As most people of quiet conscience do, I tremble at the sounds of distant gunfire. One cannot go through the sonnets of Wilfred Owen or the haunted syllables of Siegfried Sassoon and still be indifferent to the enormity of war's waste.

Owen, that sweet singer, wrote not merely with ink but with the very blood of youth. "My subject is War," he said, "and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." Alas, pity has become an orphan. We make a garland of words for the dead, while the living rot in silence.

I recall, with a shiver, the lines from Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est—that poem too painful to recite, too honest to be ignored:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs...

Tell me, gentle reader, what glory lies in this grotesque music? What nation’s honour is preserved in the gurgle of a gasping lad, too young to vote but old enough to die?

Even now, from the burnt fields of Gaza to the silent snows of Ukraine, from the charred corners of Sudan to the bruised towns of India and Pakistan, the drums of war beat with a rhythm no heart should match. Bombs do not discriminate; they are equal in their cruelty—cradles and graves alike reduced to dust. Mothers do not weep in different tongues.

One hears that war is necessary. That it purifies. That it strengthens. That it defends. I dare say it corrupts more than it cleanses and deadens more than it defends. The world, it seems, is ever eager to invest in destruction but parsimonious when it comes to peace or welfare.

Sassoon once wrote, with a bitterness only the betrayed can afford:

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.


How Lamb would have wept, he who delighted in the quiet glories of chimney corners, old books, and gentle friendships! His essay on "The Old Benchers" is more harmonious to the soul than all the bugles of battle. He, a stammering, shy lover of life’s domestic decencies, would surely have turned pale at the sight of this brave new barbarism, dressed in televised spectacle and dignified with policy papers.

We speak of progress—ah, that slippery fish! What progress is there when man, gifted with language and law, still resorts to the fang and claw of war? Are we so starved of imagination that we must resolve each quarrel with death? Has diplomacy become a lost art, buried in the same trench that swallowed Owen?

The time has come to lay down not merely arms, but attitudes—to silence the songs of conquest and instead sing the lullabies of reconciliation. We must cease to romanticize slaughter and begin, perhaps, to humanize peace.

In the end, there is no victory in war. Only survivors. And even they are often ghosts in the daylight.