Tim Butcher's Blog - Posts Tagged "tim-butcher"
A Moving Discovery
What a discovery I made in a book by Laurie Lee. One reads so much about war, one knows how clearly it has been framed by filmmakers, poets and many others, that I rather felt it a topic that can no longer move me afresh.
Yet deep in Lee's `A Moment of War', his memoir about taking part in the Spanish Civil War in 1937/8 was this. No grandstanding, no chest puffing, no swagger, just searing honesty about the mucky process of taking a life in combat.
`I headed for the old barn where I'd spent my first night. I lay in a state of sick paralysis. I had killed a man, and remembered his shocked, angry eyes. There was nothing I could say to him now. Tanks rattled by and cries receded. I began to have hallucinations and breaks in the brain. I lay there knowing neither time nor place.....Was this then what I had come for, and all my journey had meant - to smudge out the life of an unknown young man in a blur of panic which in no way could affect victory or defeat?'
Jihadists, would-be American Snipers, cadets, soldiers, patriots: read these words and think, that when all is done it might just come down to `smudging out a life in a blur of panic'.
Yet deep in Lee's `A Moment of War', his memoir about taking part in the Spanish Civil War in 1937/8 was this. No grandstanding, no chest puffing, no swagger, just searing honesty about the mucky process of taking a life in combat.
`I headed for the old barn where I'd spent my first night. I lay in a state of sick paralysis. I had killed a man, and remembered his shocked, angry eyes. There was nothing I could say to him now. Tanks rattled by and cries receded. I began to have hallucinations and breaks in the brain. I lay there knowing neither time nor place.....Was this then what I had come for, and all my journey had meant - to smudge out the life of an unknown young man in a blur of panic which in no way could affect victory or defeat?'
Jihadists, would-be American Snipers, cadets, soldiers, patriots: read these words and think, that when all is done it might just come down to `smudging out a life in a blur of panic'.
