Listen, someone's screaming in agony- fortunately I speak it fluently
Spike MilliganRead
We come across thirty or so hurried graves with makeshift wooden markers. 'Private Edwards, E.', a number, and that was all. Fourteen days ago he was alive, thinking feeling, hoping... If war was a game of cards, I'd say someone was cheating.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the tragic loss of life in war and the lack of recognition for individual soldiers.
Spike Milligan's quote poignantly illustrates the stark reality of war, emphasizing the impermanence of life through the image of hurried graves marked only by simple identifiers. He expresses a sense of injustice, as if the struggles and hopes of soldiers are disregarded, akin to a game where the rules are unfairly manipulated, leading to their untimely deaths and erasing their identities.
In practice
During a memorial speech for fallen soldiers.
Listen, someone's screaming in agony- fortunately I speak it fluently
But they (the infantry) had no use for boys of twelve and thirteen, and before I had a chance in another war, the desire to kill people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away.
Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.
The object of defense is preservation; and since it is easier to hold ground than to take it, defense is easier than attack. But defense has a passive purpose: preservation; and attack a positive one: conquest.... If defense is the stronger form of war, yet has a negative object, it follows that it should be used only so long as weakness compels, and be abandoned as soon as we are strong enough to pursue a positive object.
This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.
Air Power is, above all, a psychological weapon - and only short-sighted soldiers, too battle-minded, underrate the importance of psychological factors in war.
If those who support aggressive war had seen a fraction of what I've seen, if they'd watched children fry to death from Napalm and bleed to death from a cluster bomb, they might not utter the claptrap they do.
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