If one could only look in every soldier’s heart, and know everyone’s story.
When you become a soldier, you never think that your job will entail killing, You only know you’ll be working with men.
Why are they fighting? Who will tell them (if reason exists) who will to kill them or whom they’re going to kill?
To understand life is to find out what a man thinks about and what he’s looking for.
Killing another man ( who would kill him in turn) makes it useless, if not a bestial proof of idiocy. Pascal thought that way.
Pity is a word that has no meaning in war. It simply means you’ve got a gun and he’s got a gun. You shoot, he shoots.
The quicker one hits his target and when he kills you, it’s as though you killed him.
War seems inevitable, no matter how much you reject or condemn it. It always excites in the end.
War can be likened to boxing. It is brutal and abominable. By the ringside, you get seduced, excited and caught up with it.
You take part and urge them on in tremendous fascination.
It only lasts a few minutes and afterwards, you feel ashamed that you left yourself watch man at his best — in courage and fear, cleverness and suffering; in a show of defeat and of joy in victory.
Although you hate it, you end up being attracted to it — seduced and completely enveloped in it.
Who can accept war? Why do we accept it as an inevitable evil? Name a civilization that has been able to stop it.
History dates back to the marvelous Christian civilization, based on love. Yet, it is said to have produced more war, than all others put together.
Wasn’t in Christ’s name that priests blessed flags and troops before a battle? No priest has even tried to prevent an execution or a battle. There are no principles, philosophies nor religions that can stop war. (The hippies rejected war, with flowers and LSD.)
Isn’t it ironic that the world rejoices when a surgeon successfully saves a life through a heart transplant, but also accepts the fact that thousands of strong people with healthy hearts are slaughtered for the sake of a flag or a hill?
Soldiers, with faces filled with sadness and resignation, convince themselves that they kill in the name of justice and freedom.
What freedom, what justice?
Young people, supposedly with long lives ahead of them, come into the world to die at twenty in a war.
You come into the world to die in bed when you’re old — surrounded by green trees, clear rivers and singing children.
Why has no one ever explained why killing to steal is a sin, but killing while wearing a uniform is the height of glory?
War is structured with an almost a shameless fairness – you kill me or I’ll kill you.
People, who enjoy making war and who find it glorious and exciting, must have twisted minds.
There is nothing glamorous nor exciting about it — only a filthy tragedy which you will cry over.
But dying is not the destiny of a soldier. In war, death is impersonal. It is like frozen silence – a creeping stillness where there’s not a breath of wind to sweep away the nothingness.
