Love and Trenches

An aerial view of the WWI Loos-Hulluch trench system in France. British trenches are situated on the left of the photo, and German trenches on the right - in the middle of the two is no man’s land. July 22, 1917

In Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke writes

“And so, in the end, men are brought to that most tragically ironic of all divisions, or conflicts, wherein millions of co-operative acts go into the preparation for one single destructive act. We referred to that ultimate disease of cooperation: war. (You will understand war much better if you think of it, not simply as strife come to a head, but rather as a disease, or perversion of communion. Modern war characteristically requires period of constructed acts for each destructive one; before each culminating blast there must be a vast network of interlocking operations, directed communally.) ”