"愚蠢" 的戰爭

一百年的今天, 第一次世界大戰爆發了

今天聽到了這段讀誦, 取自於 Stephen Wrayford 1918年一月寫的日記, 聽了聽, 眼淚落了下來 .....

I don't know how the days pass. The anger and the blood have gone. We sit and read. There is always someone sleeping, someone strolling. There are always others unaccounted for or absent.

           

Men come out from England like emissaries from an unknown land. I cannot picture what it means to be at peace. I do not know how people there can lead a life.

The only things that sometimes jolt us back from this trance are memories of men. In the set of the eyes of some conscripted boy I see a look of Douglas or Weir. I find myself rigid with imagining. I can see that man's skull opening as he bent down to his friend that summer morning.

We are not contemptuous of gunfire, but we have lost the power to be afraid. Shells will fall on the reserve lines and we will not stop talking. There is still blood, though no one sees. A boy lay without legs where the men took their tea from the cooker. They stepped over him.

I have tried to resist the slide into this unreal world, but I lack the strength. I am tired. Now I am tired in my soul.

Many times I have lain down and I have longed for death. I feel unworthy. I feel guilty because I have survived. Death will not come and I am cast adrift in a perpetual present.

I do not know what I have done to live in this existence. I do not know what any of us did to tilt the world into this unnatural orbit. We came here only for a few months.

No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand.

When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them.

We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings.

We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.

From Stephen Wrayford's Diary, January 1918 

今天也到了國立肖像美術館, 看了一個紀念大戰的展覽, 全是跟第一次世界大戰有關的一些政治家, 軍人, 醫生, 護士, 詩人, 畫家, 雕塑家, 與反戰人士的畫像, 雕像, 相片....

從美術館走出來, 我只希望世界不要再打這種 "愚蠢" 的戰爭了....