I’ve had this picture hanging around for a while. I took it in London, a couple of years ago, outside the Imperial War Museum. Intially, it seemed an odd place for such a sentiment, but in retrospect I think it makes perfect sense.  Well, not sense, exactly.  But it feels right.

I had resisted going to the war museum, being not much interested in military history or old tanks and guns and what not. There was some of that there, but it was much more profound than that. The focus of most exhibits was on the experiences of the people involved in the war — the generals, but also the regular soldiers, the nurses, the spies, the folks waiting back at home. I was particularly moved by an exhibit that reconstructed part of a WWI trench — the dark, damp holes in which many young men spent months, immersed in a strange combination of boredom and terror, never knowing when they might be sent out by the hundreds into a hail of machine gun fire from which there was little chance they would return — or accomplish anything by their deaths.

It is striking to go to Europe, and realize the extent to which both World Wars are so present in the consciousness of the society. If you have been to Ground Zero in New York, you have some sense of what it is like to visit Europe. Of course, that is a much fresher wound, but it was also just one attack, with comparatively a handful of deaths. Not to minimize the 9/11 attacks, but if you extrapolate the effect that event has on us, and imagine the effect on a society of two World Wars, fought on your own soil with no assurance that you or your government or your civilization would survive, and you have some sense of what it is like to walk around in London, where many buildings still have holes and scars from bullets, bombs and shrapnel. Or to sense the impact on French society of 1.3 million young men killed in four short years during World War I (half the men in France aged 18 to 35!). Or to stand on the cliffs of Normandy, where the ground is pitted from munitions and the air is heavy with ghosts.

Lots of people know more about this stuff than I do, at least lots of you who read this blog. And what, you may ask, does it have to do with the picture at the top?

It’s hard to explain. There are a lot of things we can’t change. How many wars have there been since the War to End All Wars? How many more will there be before we realize that killing and plundering and rape don’t solve any more today than they did in 1917 when wave after wave of young men were hurled into machine gun fire for no damn reason? (Has there ever been a war where so little ground was gained by so many deaths?)

All we can change, after all, is our own life. If only enough people did, maybe it would do some good.