Beast Named War
Lacey Meek
These
Are the eyes of the Beast:
Bronze stars and gleaming metals,
Resting in a velvet case.
Mommy stands at attention,
Her family looking on proudly.
She has been swallowed and spat back
By the Beast,
Outwardly calm and peaceful. No one can see
That the scars are inside, not out.
This
Is the Beast’s beauty:
The darkness of the night.
The door swings open
And light falls upon a gilded carousel.
A tall, lean man slips in
Through the door
And falls to his knees
By the bed of his little girl.
She is grown now,
Different than when he left
For the war. Yet she is still the same,
Ever and always
His little girl.
The Beast’s roar
Is echoed off of city walls,
Men and women proclaiming their freedom
To the world.
The manacles they break
Are invisible to mortal eyes,
Yet are heavy as lead upon their hearts.
They shed this iron,
And the chains fall off
Into the dust
To rot.
The coat of the Beast
Is golden and glorious,
Inspiring and beautiful
When admired form a distance.
One by one
Brave soldiers dare to step forward
To inspect it closer,
And many are swallowed whole.
Those that are cunning
Or foolhardy
May live to inspect the Beast closely.
What is it that they find?
Break in the Poem
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| Poem Break |
Underneath the luxurious coat,
The skin is broken.
It is raw and torn,
Each wound a violent
And gruesome
Story left untold. This scar
Is a veteran killing himself,
Straight and clean
As though drawn with a knife.
It is not completely healed,
The widow’s acid tears
Continuing to reopen the wound.
Only she
Keeps his memory alive.
Another soldier
Holds a book to his breast,
Searching for questions that no mortal can answer.
He searches for forgiveness
Because he can find none for himself.
These emotions are the Beast’s razor claws,
The spirits slaughtered by his hands
Haunting him.
Yet the words of this book
Bind the wounds of the claws.
The words: Holy Bible
Are printed in dusky gold
Upon its cover.
Others find less graceful methods
To staunch the emotions.
The scars of soldiering
Are threatening to consume
That same outwardly calm woman.
Memories of splintered bones
Of jagged stumps
Occupy her mind,
Unraveling her into a chaotic abyss
Of dreams.
She’ll try to drink the scars away,
Praying fervently
That intoxication can hide her insanity.
Together,
The soldiers rise up to face the Beast,
Each one torn,
Killed,
Or falling to insanity.
They push on
Even though it is hopeless,
A Sisyphean task.
Someone
Must bear the burden,
To rest is to die. It is a never-ending flow
Of soldiers,
Of men,
Of women,
Pursuing relentlessly
Through the night. They march
Until the Beast named War
Essay Final Draft:
Facets of the Darkest Dream
Lacey Meek 10/24/11
War is glorious, war brings honor. These are only facets of the truth of war, grains of sand on a sunny beach. War is bitter, it is cruel. It transforms you and strips you of the person you once were. If, through that process, you become a better person, a hero even, then that is the good of war. War becomes your life; scars that you earn are proudly displayed upon your skin and soul for the rest of eternity, branding you as one of war’s own. The scars are marks of the life or death choices that you have been forced to make, and this is nothing that anyone who hasn’t experienced war can easily understand. Civilians suffer from an in infectious disease that spreads like wildfire: our own ignorance. Until we no longer view every death as a statistic, until we heal our emotional detachment with war, we will never be able to escape this ailment. What we need to understand is that war, like anything, is three-dimensional, and has many different faces that must be recognized. If we can’t expand on our views, it will kill masses. We have only a matter of time.
War is a chasm, a dark void and endless cavern that rests between the civilian and the soldier, how they react and feel about bad events. That is one way that war is viewed, as a break between the civilian and the soldier. In All Quiet on the Western Front, written by German war veteran Erich Maria Remarque, the main character, Paul, shows this break very clearly: “I will never tell her, she can make mincemeat out of me first. I pity her, but she strikes me as stupid all the same. Why doesn’t she stop worrying? Kemmerich will stay dead whether she knows about it or not. When a man has seen so many dead he cannot understand any longer why there should be so much anguish over an individual. So I say rather impatiently: ‘He died immediately. He felt absolutely nothing at all. His face was quite calm.’” (Page 181) The separation between Paul and Kemmerich’s mother is very evident in this paragraph. While Kemmerich’s mother is wondering how this could have possibly happened to her son, Paul doesn’t feel much pain at all. In war, pain and dying are very common and he can no longer see the reason for so much distress over the death of one man. Similarly, if a random passerby had overheard the news, they wouldn’t care. It would be a sad thing, yes. It’s lamentable, even. However, he didn’t know the man so there would be no reason to get worked up. This desensitization to death is a recurring theme in everyday life and is unlikely to change soon. We don’t truly understand the depths and cruelties that lie within war.
War is an atrocity; it magnifies the blackest of nightmares and then forces soldiers to undergo that horror. The soldier can only react in one of three ways: survive, be killed, or go insane: “…There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like poo-tee-weet?” (Vonnegut, 19) This was written in Slaughterhouse Five, and has a shard of ringing truth: there is nothing civil or cohesive that can truly be said about a massacre. Nothing that is any more effective than the chirping of birds or swaying of grass. These natural sounds are the only things that you will be able to hear after such an atrocity. No one is supposed to be able to speak, they should all be dead. We mustn’t continue this senseless murder. In All Quiet on the Western Front, this is supported: “We see men living with their skulls blown open; we see soldiers run with their two feet cut off, they stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shell-hole; a lance-corporal crawls a mile and a half on his hands dragging his smashed knee after him; another goes to the dressing station and over his clasped hands bulge his intestines; we see men without mouths, without jaws, without faces; we find one man who has held the artery of his arm in his teeth for two hours in order not to bleed to death.” (Remarque, page 134.) This is a description of nightmares, not one that is easily imagined. It is cruel, and many could not survive in this scenario. The graphic scene painted in this paragraph cannot be assumed as unusual because of the author’s status as a war veteran. This is the kind of horror that we’ve been desensitized to, what we distance ourselves from seeing with unmanned drones and long-range missiles. Again though, this is only one facet of war. War is also perceived as a cage that few can walk from unharmed.
Once you have slipped into the depths of war, there is no escape. You never heal, and must carry the scars boldly throughout the rest of your life, if that extends beyond the end of the war. You have tumbled into the black yawning chasm that is a battle. Surrounding you are the rusty exoskeletons of cars; a building blasted into rubble; a man calling for help that you cannot give for the rain of bullets that spray in between you. A child huddles in the corner, tear-streaked face caked with mud and filth, looking at you with eyes that can never broadcast the full extent of your betrayal of them. This is the cage of war, and you must carry the memory of that child with you forever, imprinted in the insides of your eyelids among a thousand other memories. This is shown in Slaughterhouse Five, the scarring memories that linger with the main character Billy: “Billy thought hard about the effect the quartet had had on him, and then found an association with an experience he had had long ago. He did not travel in time to the experience. He remembered it shimmeringly- as follows… the guards drew together instinctively, rolled their eyes. They experimented with one expression, then another, said nothing, though their mouths were often open. They looked like a silent film of a barbershop quartet. ‘So long forever,’ they might have been singing, old fellows and pals; so long forever, old sweethearts and pals.’” (Vonnegut, 177-178.) The reaction that Billy experienced was directly related to the moments that he experienced after the firebombing in Dresden, and the memories still evoked a strong reaction in him. The song made him shake and grow pale, sickly. He couldn’t escape it despite the years that spanned between that moment and his memory. No one around him understood it, or what had happened to Billy, and he knew that there was no point in explaining it to them because of that same yawning chasm. These inner scars came from the worst imaginable slaughter and discord. War is often a hideous and violent beast. However this is not always the case, and from this viewpoint the good truths of war are often overlooked.
Despite the dark shadows, war, like anything else, has good points and moments that attempt to balance out the bad: “These are wonderfully care-free hours. Over us is the blue sky. On the horizon float the yellow, sunlit observation balloons, and the many little white clouds of the anti-aircraft shells… Around us stretches the flowery meadow. The grasses sway their tall spears; the white butterflies flutter around and float on the soft warm wind of the late summer. We read newspapers and letters and smoke. We take off our caps and lay them down beside us. The wind plays with our hair; it plays with our words and thoughts. The three boxes stand in the midst of the glowing, red field poppies.” (Remarque, 9) This is a caption from All Quiet on the Western Front, describing a lazy day in camp. Moments of peace like this are few and far between for soldiers. They won’t be taken for granted or as a privilege like the weekends are for most students. Doesn’t the amplified gratitude and relaxation shown by the soldiers then make these moments more beautiful? This is just another facet, simply a smaller one that is often overshadowed by views that war is only cruel or that war is completely unavoidable. The good of war isn’t just shown in these moments either: it is in the freedom of a nation, the joy of a child when her father comes home, and in the maturity shown by a soldier when he’s more appreciative of the smaller joys of life.
The life of a soldier changes them irrevocably, and it is often then that the best pieces and fragments of war come out in them. This is also shown in All Quiet on the Western Front, as Paul comments on how the person he is now contrasts from the person he used to be: “thus momentarily we have the two things a soldier needs for contentment: good food and rest. That’s not much when one comes to think of it. A few years ago we would have despised ourselves terribly. But now we are almost happy. It is all a matter of habit- even on the front-line.” (Remarque, 138) For at least for a moment, Paul and his companions are happy, far more contented with this small thing than they would’ve been before. They have matured from the boys that they used to be and are now far more easily contented with the privileges that they are subjected to. Similar to the breaks from fighting, an ample supply and variety of food is rare for these soldiers, making them happier for what they gain. They appreciate simple and happy things such as friendship far more than they would have before. Though some may have had little to do with each other outside of the war, they are far beyond petty dislike and intolerance. War has become Paul’s life, his friends are his new family, and they keep each other safe as best as they can even after the war is finished. Even if this means only carrying the memory of a fallen friend with them, they still care for each other. This is one of the strongest beauties of war.
Both of these stories, All Quiet on the Western Front and Slaughterhouse Five, have been written by war veterans, giving unique perspectives on insanity inspired by war and on the experiences of warfare in both WW1 and WW2. It can be safely assumed that there is at least a grain of truth to each of these stories and even that grain is a change from what we believe war to be. With the addition modern warfare into the fray, we distance the soldiers as well. By distancing the soldiers, we burn the final bridge over the chasm. People who are more likely to cry at the death of a horse in a movie than a human have been dangerously desensitized, and this is true of most people. With urban warfare, there is more accidental targeting of civilians who have done nothing wrong, simply stood in the wrong place at the wrong time. Warfare needs to evolve again before a disaster strikes.
War is an alien world to ours, foreign and strange. Only in experiencing the fight can we understand what it is that we subject our soldiers to. Thousands killed are civilians, and millions killed are innocents, sent into the war at the whim of their government, not their own wills. To truly end this wanton killing is to have every single person in the world understand the truth of war fully and completely as a plural: truths. As of yet, unfortunately, this is impossible to accomplish. War therefore needs to evolve. In a better world, pain would be felt for every death and there would be true recognition of every soldier’s contribution to their country. For now though, with everything as it is, this remains modern warfare’s cruelest and deadliest truth: the ever-widening separation of a man from the bloodshed inflicted by his hand.
Works Cited:
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. New York: Random House Inc., 1991.
Remarque, Erich M. All Quiet on the Western Front. Random House, 1929.
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