A blooded, ragged soldier, the remains of a dirty cloth tied around a forearm, crusted human juice covering half of it; wide, terrible eyes and handgun moving left to right, up and down, seeking targets. Limping through the wreckage of a contested city, the whines of bombs and whistling bullets sizzling a few blocks away stopped, a non-sound at which he no longer wonders.
The soldier hears something else, a noise out of place; akin to a thin shaft of light streaking past cracks in the dark. He makes his way toward it, shoving cement pieces and broken wood away from the new sound.
He moved a last…
A human sound, a tired whimpering, a bloodied toddler. It was lying in a smashed crib, the bottom holding the child up, its blankets tossed aside. An unbroken piece of flat wood had protected it, fallen on top of its crib. As the soldier pulled the last pieces of rubble away, its light mewling stopped, its bright eyes locked onto his. A pause. Little arms reached out. The soldier stumbled back, as if confronted by a horror too visceral to be grasped with a single look, gun still in hand, pointed at this sprout of an enemy.
And that is the question.
Technically enemies, that soldier and this child share everything human: copper in the blood, physical attributes, reason. But it is still an enemy, or the progeny of an enemy, whose parents might have been the ones who ordered their soldiers to strike everywhere at once.
Or they are out there right now, looking to kill for their team and not be killed by the other team, acting on their rights for revenge.
Or they could be scientists working on weapons that kill at a distance, so that foot soldiers marauding through streets could mop up (amazing how banal language can make killing seem).
Perhaops they are comfortable intellectuals sitting on modern stoas, expostulating sophistical philosophy or even theological justification for how their team has a right to cleanse their world of the human-like vermin that threaten them.
They might have been innocents-even protestors: weak, herd-like men and women whose justification for being alive is based on their ability to produce more males who will become the next generation of warriors to continue the ‘magnificent splendour’ of war as glory and the making of MEN (thank you dear Friedrich). These may be dead already, buried in the rubble around the toddler-thing.
So, what are the options?
Do what a detached Russian soldier (captured and interviewed) related; that he had blown a Ukrainian toddler’s head off because it was crying. Should this soldier follow that brave, human male and eliminate some whore’s whelp before it grows up and kills some of the soldier’s people in another generation, repeating the mantra of ‘me and mine’ or ‘you and yours’ ?. There is no middle ground.
Perhaps he could leave it there where feral dogs or humans would allow his, possibly, problematic conscience some relief, making him feel better about himself and his duty.
Or does he pick it up, cradle it, take it away, and risk one of his team members holding it by the feet and killing it in the time-honoured manner of bashing a head on rock; perhaps, in doing so, he would also risk himself for turning into a squeamish female, as to treat this little protoplasmic thing as human.
Because if a soldier stops, blanches from inhumanity, snaps awake and away from detachment, he or she can no longer be a soldier.
If the soldier can see this thing as human and not as an enemy that must be exterminated, hope for an end to the ‘my tribe or yours’ – win or lose, everything or nothing might just come to birth, and grow.
If so, what would generals do for a living? Something useful, like art or dressing hair? How would war profiteers make money? What would politicians do with their military toys?
How then would the rest of us live?
*Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, Richard Wilbur