Valley of the Shadows

97 years ago today a man was lying in No-Man's Land, that gray muddy extreme between the trenches, churned into a quagmire by endless artillery shells.  He was an ordinary man, his uniform too bloody and muddy and torn to be recognized.  Maybe his comrades had left him or maybe they were all around him, lying still where he still moaned.

97 years ago today a man was lying in No-Man's Land, crying for water, or his mother, or his sweetheart.  Maybe he wasn't alone.  Maybe there were other voices in this dismal choir, men just like him lying in other soggy holes and valleys.  But they weren't with him.  He was alone, crying for help, crying for some power to rescue him.

97 years ago today a man was lying in No-Man's Land denying the inevitable or perhaps starting to feel like it would be better to let go.  Maybe he was preparing to meet his God, or maybe he had no God to meet and was merely unwilling to give up and say goodbye.  Maybe he was asking himself why.  Maybe he was trying to bargain.  We don't know.  We weren't there.  No one was there.

97 years ago today a man lying in No-Man's Land died.  He died as we all must, but alone and in pain and before his time.  He wanted to live, like we all do.  But war cut him short, a great scythe that reaps crop and weed alike, uncaring and brutal.

And 97 years ago today, they say the guns stopped.

And isn't that lovely to believe.  Armistice Day, a day of peace, an end to violence, to war.  A day to celebrate.

But remember that 97 years ago today a man died, and before that another, and before that another, a long line, unbroken in grief, stretching back to the beginning.  All those men, women, children, animals, all waiting in that gray place we want to ignore as we celebrate peace and thank a veteran and publish the American flag on our Facebook wall.  They're all waiting in No-Man's Land.  Ending the war didn't undo their suffering.

Do you see them?  They're there.  They've stopped crying out for anything, but their spirits still weep.  And their numbers still grow, as they have since before history began.

97 years ago today, a war ended.  But in that gray land between the trenches, nothing changed.  And nothing ever will change unless we remember why an end to war is worth celebrating.  Unless we remember the man lying in No-Man's Land crying in vain for his mother.