Notes on Saving Private Ryan

[kuangning]

... death en masse was never meant to be a spectator sport.

Silence.
The stillness suffocates,
Presses down upon hearts growing old,
Upon once-blithe spirits that now match
Suddenly-gaunt faces
And eyes bleak with knowledge
In the moment before the fire falls -
And still, they went forward.

Chaos.
Bodies fallen across bodies
Beneath boots that do nothing to soften
The sickening crunch of bone
Shattering like driftwood underfoot,
The meaty slide of flesh
Resolutely ignored,
Familiar faces and bodies
Reduced to obstacles to be climbed over
Lest you, too, lie where they fell -
And still, they went forward.

Hell.
Fire around, before, behind,
The inescapable stench of fear and scorching flesh,
The stickiness of blood, staining and drying,
That will not wash away.
Shouts almost indiscernible;
Human voices have lost the power
To pierce the cloak of terror
That is the certainty of death -
And still, they went forward.

What does it take,
What strength, what magic,
To go forward when all around you
Is death,
When every moment is another snatched,
Stolen from the hounds of hell
Whose breath is the rank whiff
Of fire and fear, so warm on your neck?
Causes cease to matter.
When your day comes to fall,
The only victory lies in going forward.
It is inelegant, it is vicious, it is repellent,
Glory of the most heinous kind -
( but glory, nonetheless )
That when the call came,
To go out and stand to die -
They went forward.

Arguing the cause
Is the province of civilians,
Whose duty it must be,
To ensure that those who stand
Do not do so needlessly or in vain.
Weighing the necessity
Is for those who must count lives
As coin, and spend them dear.
Debate, for that is needful,
But -
When you come to argue the right,
To judge what is just and what reprehensible,
No matter on which side of the gulf,
Behind which colours, country, or ideal you stand,
Remember, of the wall of bodies
Who protect you and fall for you -
Remember -
They went forward.

Comments

[gurath.livejournal.com]

I have some personal connections to that time. My parents were teenagers in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation, and I am still, in some sense dealing with the effects on them; the way it made them afraid of some things. My dad remembers hiding in a root cellar while a tank parked half on top of it blew a kitchen annex off their house to move through, and sleeping each night in the basement, to reduce the chances of being killed by shells until the Germans were driven far enough away. He remembers a friend killed by stray bomb shrapnel from a mistakenly directed air raid while walking home from school. My mother lived through the Hunger Winter, while part of Holland was still occupied, but cut off from Germany, and there was little for civilians to eat; she keeled over in a bread lineup, weighing 100 lbs. The stories go on: the uncle in the underground, without "papers", married in a street watched by compatriots with machine guns under their coats... later seeing one of the first V2 rockets in a clearing in the woods. My aunt, recently passed away at 89, who pregnant was taken into a Japanese prison camp in Indonesia (former Dutch colony) and emerged 4 years later, sat down at a piano, and played Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" perfectly, having rehearsed it in her mind every day. My dad said she had great inner peace, and a strong philosophy of life.

My dad developed a good philosophy of life, I think in part due to what he went through. He always says, "Death hides in a very small corner.", and "Watch out for them, when they start burning books." My mom remains fearful of so many things, and always fed us so well, that I am now on Weight Watchers. It's like there are just endless, tiny echoes of the war, still dying away around the world in people's minds.

My uncle drove an ammunition truck off a landing craft, and up Juno beach. He went back for the first time at the 50 year reunion, but had not spoken of the terror until then. I can hardly imagine... just like I can hardly imagine little Canada taking one of the four beaches at D-Day, while Britain took one, and the US two.

In any case, the Canadians were sent north, into the Netherlands, and to this day are remembered there. A Canadian visiting there is invited home, and fed. School children tend the graveyards of the fallen. My uncle married one of my father's sisters, and that... is why I am Canadian now, since he followed them here with my mother 5 years later.

Endless echos......