Column

The darkness of war has never left this Earth. Though civilizations have risen only to be doomed by avarice and necessity, the pall of Ares has hung over history like a cloak of constancy.

This week, as the world remembered those that have fallen on battlefields from Normandy and Kursk, to the Somme and Ypres, the distant sound of artillery thunders in Helmand. To try and justify war is as difficult as trying to define it. Man’s thirst to kill is as insatiable as his need to look for peace.

The damnation that is war is borne only by those who have lived under the bleak overcast clouds of dread, and those for whom the trenches of the Great War became coffins of earth.

There are no words that I could possibly write, conjure no images that might portray the desolation of battle. So today, in honour of those that have laid down their lives in the line of duty for a man-made religion and ideology; for their families and friends; for you and I…I will use the words of Wilfred Gibson.

They ask me where I’ve been,
And what I’ve done and seen.
But what can I reply
Who know it wasn’t I,
But someone just like me,
Who went across the sea
And with my head and hands
Killed men in foreign lands...
Though I must bear the blame,
Because he bore my name.