Those young writing-men who had set out in a spirit of adventure went back to Fleet Street with a queer look in their eyes, unable to write the things they had seen, unable to tell them to people who had not seen and could not understand. Because there was no code of words which would convey the picture of that wild agony of peoples, that smashing of all civilized laws, to men and women who still thought of war in terms of heroic pageantry.
- Philip Gibbs, Now it Can be Told
Code of Words is written by me, Clay.
I’m a former U.S. Army Blackhawk pilot and Commissioned Officer turned conscientious objector (1-o). This blog is a serialized version of a book I’m in the process of authoring called Code of Words: War Through the Eyes of Warriors.
The block quote above is from the British Great War correspondent, Philip Gibbs. I believe it conveys an important truth; unless you’ve experienced firsthand the horrors of war, it’s impossible to understand what it’s really like.
"You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it[…]”
-William Tecumseh Sherman
While It’s impossible to truly understand war unless you’ve lived through it, I do think we can get close. Through the stories told by the men and women who’ve suffered the worst war has to offer, we can come close to empathizing with their agony.
Hopefully, after seeing it through the eyes of warriors, we can realize war is an unnecessary evil.
