April 18, 2010

After the Marne fighting


We really don't talk much these days about the hundreds of thousands who died in World War I. It's gradually just fading into history, another set of dates to memorize and forget. After all, who's going to complain - these guys?

Marne River near Paris, France
1910s
from Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands

6 comments:

Ms. Moon said...

We probably walk on bones all the time. And the dead are silent.

That Hank said...

I've thought about that before, about how there's dead things all beneath our feet constantly. Especially in Florida - limestone is dead things!

Ms. Moon said...

And in the sea- the bones of so many dead things- fishes and men and women and boats and dreams, too, of course.

That Hank said...

And the calcium of their bones is filtered through plants to become the calcium of our bones.

May said...

This conversation is pretty heavy for "...dreams..". I think about this too. I think about war and how we are so coddled in this country. We (most of us) just have no idea what it would be like. I know I don't, but I think about it.

That Hank said...

I think about that whenever I watch movies set in England in the past hundred years. The war damage from this century is just still so visible - they all live with it every day. And here we think it was the end of the world when we lost two buildings. Yes, any loss of life is too much, but still.