We buried ours, and the Turks buried theirs

On the day after the sixty-sixth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, in memory of all those who lost their lives in the wars of the past hundred years, and of those who continue to give their lives in the hell of war.

Even if you know this song, and even if you've heard Liam Clancy sing it, you will not forget this performance.

Between the Wars [UPDATED]

[Update, 2/6/09: Janet quite rightly points out in the combox that the young Joseph Ratzinger was compelled to fight for the Third Reich, which is certainly not the case for today's "soldiers" for abortion rights. The young Joseph Ratzinger's desertion makes clear his opposition to the evil cause for which he was made to fight. No one, of course, compels Americans to fight against our weakest citizens. In my last paragraph below, I was merely wondering at the way that God sometimes nurtures great good and holiness from evil soil, and hoping that this might be the case with the most committed pro-choicers. But of course, we have to choose it.]

***********************************************

I went to Mass today in a little chapel near my new home. At the Prayer of the Faithful, the priest invited the congregation to voice their petitions. I was about to ask my fellow communicants to pray for my brothers to find work, but an elderly man offered the intention "For an end to the war . . . of abortion." I was struck by his analogy and forgot my prayer request, and indeed no one else mentioned their petitions after this one.

If abortion is a war, that means there are victims of two kinds, at least as we've come to define them: casualties and collateral damage. Collateral damage is damage that is incidental to the intended outcome of the war. If unwanted babies are the intended casualties of this war, then their mothers (and fathers, and grandparents, and on and on in ever-widening concentric circles) are the collateral damage. If we can't bring back the dead, at least, as in a war, we must bind up the wounds of those calamitously injured in it and work to reintroduce them into society.

And if this is a war, then there are generals, officers, infantry and foot-soldiers on both sides. There are, of course, the vocal and dedicated spokesmen (usually, on the pro-choice side, spokeswomen) who rally the rank and file and lead the troops in battle. But the commitment of the soldiers themselves to the cause for which they are fighting varies widely. Many people on the pro-choice side simply accept that abortion is legal and assume it's an uncontestable right; after all, when something is legal, one can usually safely assume that, if not in the interest of the common welfare, it's at least not something that will harm one's fellow citizens. These people might be induced to march in a rally, or might simply do nothing, as so many good Germans did.

It seems to me that, if lovingly presented with the truth, some of these soldiers might lay down their arms and work instead toward the creation of a more just society, in which all lives are valued equally. Many of them care deeply about justice in the abstract, and abortion rights have become firmly entrenched in the public mind as one of the freedoms that should be guaranteed by our hyper-individualistic society; like the good Germans, these soldiers are unquestioning.

But soldiers can have changes of heart; and soldiers, after the war, must be rehabilitated. One German conscript, for instance, who deserted from the Wehrmacht is now Pope Benedict XVI.

Dead Musicians

I
From you, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart,
The substance of my dreams took fire.
You built cathedrals in my heart,
And lit my pinnacled desire.
You were the ardour and the bright
Procession of my thoughts toward prayer.
You were the wrath of storm, the light
On distant citadels aflare.

II
Great names, I cannot find you now
In these loud years of youth that strives
Through doom toward peace: upon my brow
I wear a wreath of banished lives.
You have no part with lads who fought
And laughed and suffered at my side.
Your fugues and symphonies have brought
No memory of my friends who died.

III
For when my brain is on their track,
In slangy speech I call them back.
With fox-trot tunes their ghosts I charm.
"Another little drink won't do us any harm."
I think of rag-time; a bit of rag-time;
And see their faces crowding round
To the sound of the syncopated beat.
They've got such jolly things to tell,
Home from hell with a Blighty wound so neat . . .

* * * * *
And so the song breaks off; and I'm alone.
They're dead . . . For God's sake stop that gramophone.

- Siegried Sassoon, Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)
H/T: Soho the Dog

The Children

In my upcoming dissertation voice recital, I'm doing the recently-published Three Scottish Songs by James MacMillan. MacMillan has chosen texts from the work of poet William Soutar, who was a major figure in the Scottish Literary Revival of the early twentieth century in spite of the fact that he was confined to bed for most of his life with ankylosing spondylitis. One of these poems, "The Children," is about the Battle of Britain; Benjamin Britten set the same text in his cycle Who Are These Children?, composed in the late 1960s.

Upon the street they lie
Beside the broken stone:
The blood of children stares from the broken stone.

Death came out of the sky
In the bright afternoon:
Darkness slanted over the bright afternoon.

Again the sky is clear
But upon the earth a stain:
The earth is darkened with a darkening stain:

A wound which everywhere
Corrupts the hearts of men:
The blood of children corrupts the heart of men.

Silence is in the air:
The stars move to their places:
Silent and serene the stars move to their places.

There is a sixth stanza too, which MacMillan chose not to set:

But from the earth the children stare
With blind and fearful faces:
And our charity is in the children's faces.

The song is stark and chilling, with a sing-song, music-box effect. I'm not sure if it would be more or less disturbing with the addition of the last stanza. Without it, the deaths of the children bombed from the air seem to have occurred against the impersonal backdrop of unchanging nature. With it, we are all invoked and implicated.