Status Updates From El Soldado Olvidado

Abandoned by a God in whom many of us believed, we lay prostrate and dazed in our demi-tomb. We felt like lost souls, who had forgotten that men are made for something else, that time exists, and hope, and sentiments other than anguish; that friendship can be more than ephemera, love can sometimes occur, the earth can be used for something other than burying the dead. We were madmen, without thought or hope.

I called on all my reserves of strength to get up and run. I had covered about a third of the distance when the Russian planes attacked, shooting rockets into the buildings, which disintegrated like matchwood. Then we could hear the engines of the planes fading into the distance. Everyone who was able stood up again. No one spoke. We stared at the flames, at the sky, at the reddening heaps of human remains.

I can remember very distinctly the first deaths I encountered in the war. The thousands upon thousands which followed are blurred and faceless: a vast, cumulative nightmare which still haunts me, in which atrocious mutilations appear side by side with figures who seem to be peacefully sleeping, or with others whose eyes are opened astonishingly wide, stamped by death with an uncommunicable terror.

The Snow Man
~ Wallace Stevens ~
excerpt

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted

… and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener ..
Nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.