It was supposed to be the war to end all wars.
It was not, of course. When it ended--on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918--15 million were dead, and the seeds of World War II had been planted.
A lot of books were published to try and sort things out; to excoriate the poor leadership in evidence before, during and after the conflict; to memorialize the fallen:
Poets tried to capture the futility of it all...
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. (Rupert Brooke)
But it would take 76 years, and an astronomer, to really capture the waste of this, and all wars, most succinctly.
In 1990, a spacecraft--Voyager I--turned and took a final photo of its home planet before it sailed away forever into the unknown reaches of outer space. Taken from a distance of almost 4 billion miles, Earth is but a speck:
Carl Sagan, the Cornell University astronomer who had chaired the committee that designed the Golden Record which accompanied both Voyager spacecraft (launched in 1977), had this to say about the above photograph in a lecture at Cornell on 13 October 1994:
That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
For veterans of all nationalities, wherever you may be....
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