War is not a trumpet; it is a journal.
It tallies the cost of breath
in units of bone,
in coinages of ash,
in the soundless mathematics of mothers
who survive their sons.
Do not dress it in banners—
they are only laundered shrouds.
Do not call it glory—
that word is a fraud in a well-cut suit,
smiling with teeth paid for in marrow.
What is a nation, really,
when its borders are inked in blood
and then redrawn by men
who will never smell the decomposition they decree?
What is honour, when it requires a boy
to unlearn the very instinct
that kept his ancestors alive?
You speak of sacrifice.
For whom?
For what brittle abstraction
must a man become an instrument of ruin?
Answer plainly—
and do not you dare lie.
Is the soil improved by corpses?
Does the sky applaud artillery?
Does history, that pompous archivist,
truly give a damn for your medals,
or does it merely file them away
beside a million unnamed regrets?
War teaches efficiency—
how swiftly a spine can be broken,
how cleanly a city can be unmade,
how a conscience can be stifled
with the dull repetition of orders.
And you call this progress?
It is a grotesque curriculum.
A perverse education in annihilation,
where the final examination
is written in the handwriting of the dead.
Tell me—
when did we decide that intelligence
was best proven
by devising more elegant ways to kill?
When did evolution become
this thin, trembling veneer
over a snarling, ancient hunger?
We build cathedrals,
compose symphonies,
write philosophies dense with meaning—
and then, with the same hands,
we pull triggers.
What a spectacular fucking contradiction.
War does not merely kill bodies;
it vandalises the future.
It maims the unborn,
corrupts the yet-to-be,
plants in the centre of time
a sickness that generations must brave.
It is not an event.
It is an inheritance.
And you—
you who speak of necessity,
of strategy, of defence—
have you ever stood in the aftermath
when the clamour has drained away,
and heard the unbearable silence
that follows?
It is not peace.
It is vacancy.
A void where meaning once resided,
where laughter once echoed,
where a life—ordinary, unremarkable,
precious in its very banality—
was simply erased.
So I ask again—
and I will keep asking
until the question becomes unbearable:
What conceivable good
justifies this?
What end is so luminous
that it sanctifies such darkness?
What victory is so complete
that it compensates
for a single extinguished soul?
If you cannot answer—
and you cannot—
then say it.
Say, with brutal honesty,
that war is not a solution
but a confession:
that we have failed
to be human.
