The Pity of War

 It was the Kargil Day on July 26. The day  reminded me of the First World War tragedies as it was  this 1914-18 war that truly highlighted all the gruesome viciousness of war, the way soldiers suffer, the 'pity of war' as Wilfred Owen, one of the most intense poets of the genre, wrote most evocatively.

The World War I was indeed a cataclysmic event. It changed the very paradigm of war-making. All the earlier wars were 'one on one' wars. One soldier fought with the other on an individual basis, be it a horseman or be it a foot soldier. However cruel it may sound, it has to be admitted that such a war had some chance of exhibiting soldierly skills.

The first World War changed it all. The mechanised weapons, whether it be the machine guns or the Zeplin's dropping crude bombs, were clearly weapons of mass destruction. Each European country, as well as its colonies then, lost literally an entire generation in this war. With young men dying on the border, women had to first time ever run the daily goings-on of ordinary lived realities.

Truly devastating, however, was the trench warfare. The soldiers, most of them young men in their very early twenties, suffered physically and psychologically due to the trench war.The constant rains and the snow, the terrible smell of rot as the corpses of the dying soldiers, the once-upon-a-time battalion buddies, would be decomposing just a foot away, these were numbing experiences. The trench rats, moreover, would be nibbling away the corpses' organs. No surprise whatsoever then that the trench poetry was known as the shell-shocked poetry.

The first World War had yet another decisive effect on the social imaginary. The realisation that wars were graveyards for people, especially the young, because the so-called leaders, kings, prime ministers, czars took thoughtless decisions wiped out all possible glorification of wars and empty patriotism. 

Reading poems by the hugely talented poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Edmund Blunden is a soul searing experience. Truly tragic was the fate of the soldiers from the colonies who were fighting an alien war in extremely unfriendly contexts every which way. Their plight is slowly emerging from the annals, and would most authentically explore the real 'pity of war'.

Pratima@ "This War will end all wars,' wrote H.G.Wells of the first World War. Unfortunately, it just sowed the seeds of the Second, which included The Holocaust and the Hiroshima-Nagasaki!