When the World Goes Quiet

by Gian Sardar

There is nothing worse than silence, in a moment after. Ask a woman who’s just given birth. Ask a father who saw a wagon tip and is running, calling out names. Ask a daughter whose mother didn’t make it into the shelter, because of her. Silence screams loudest of all.

Sometimes fault is also like a wind. It slips into cracks and fills spaces.

in the midst of a war that wasn’t ending, entrenched with unspeakable horror and loss, the only correct way to live was whatever way they could.

A bullet kills at the end of the war the same way it does at the start.”

Isn’t it wonderful, when what someone perceives is even better than what’s there? The painting was a promise: Your world doesn’t need to be the one others see.

Though Belgium was neutral and forced into the war when Germany invaded, the war’s catalyst has reduced over the years and become simple in her mind, like something simmered on the stove too long: a little to do with an Austrian archduke who was shot point-blank when his motorcar took a wrong turn, landing him in the path of a young Serbian conspirator, and a lot to do with allegiances that sparked one to another to another like a long chain of dynamite, the entire world becoming bright with pain. Can you imagine, our collective fate rested on that one choice, Coletta has said. Right or left. From there, fighting not just in Europe, but Africa and the Middle East. Belgium, once forests and fields and blankets of bluebells, has since been blasted and cratered and veined with trenches, while the men who are lucky enough to survive are too often trapped in the cages of their minds, living an endless nightmare.

this is what intry to explain to my students when teaching WWI....

“Right and wrong—those ideas not only depend on who tells the story, but on when the story stops. Or when it starts. Wouldn’t you agree? Not everyone gets the full picture. When you’re in the midst of something, it’s hard to see that. Though we’re at the end of this war, we’re still very much in the midst.

We shouldn’t be thankful we’ve survived; we should be angry we’ve not lived.

Bombs and guns and starvation are obvious killers, but what loneliness does simply takes longer.

Always look for the knife behind the back of kindness,

But the need to be right—to insist you are right—has caused more problems in the world than actually being wrong.

“For once,” he says quietly, his words a heat on her skin, “I did my best. But I’ll have you know, all I wanted to do was my very worst.”

You think like an artist. That’s not wrong. Being different is not wrong. It’s interesting. If it wasn’t, we’d all paint the same thing and see the world the same way and there’d be no movement, and no chance at understanding.”

continuing on with a mistake doesn’t make it right. It only makes it bigger.”

How someone lives is all that matters.”

Maybe the real casualty of war is right and wrong. Even the belief that there is a right and wrong.