Listen, someone's screaming in agony- fortunately I speak it fluently
Spike MilliganRead
We come across thirty or so hurried graves with makeshift wooden markers. 'Private Edwards, E.', a number, and that was all. Fourteen days ago he was alive, thinking feeling, hoping... If war was a game of cards, I'd say someone was cheating.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the tragic loss of life in war and the lack of recognition for individual soldiers.
Spike Milligan's quote poignantly illustrates the stark reality of war, emphasizing the impermanence of life through the image of hurried graves marked only by simple identifiers. He expresses a sense of injustice, as if the struggles and hopes of soldiers are disregarded, akin to a game where the rules are unfairly manipulated, leading to their untimely deaths and erasing their identities.
In practice
During a memorial speech for fallen soldiers.
Listen, someone's screaming in agony- fortunately I speak it fluently
Having traveled to parts of the world where war has done its usual nasty work on people's lives, I have come to develop a particular hatred for the shape, the look, the sound of the AK-47.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.
I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.
No place is safe - no place is at peace. There is no place where a women and her daughter can hide and be at peace. The war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night. Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air-fleets passing overhead - dripping death - dripping death!
Smell that? You smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
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