Post by klioducatillon on Apr 28, 2008 3:28:20 GMT -5
Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.
Horace wrote those timeless lines when all our eggs lay in one basket, on a world everyone knew was flat, around which the Universe slowly spun in a nightly kaleidoscope of connect-the-dot titans and frame-frozen tragedies. A man was lucky to live to thirty, a woman to twenty, so maybe the old poet was onto something. To die so that others might live to sing your deeds may have been the only immortality a Roman might aspire to.
Nearly two millenia later, a soldier named Wilfred Owen remembered these lines while sitting in a French trench up to his waist in blood and mud, and with a bayonet pen he added an equally timeless addendum:
The old lie.
For the Great War decimated a generation, yet nothing was decided, nobody really 'won,' and hatred so filled the hearts of Tommy and Jerry that it was only really a question of when the next war would come. This has largely been the legacy of every war fought since.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Ten years ago, I was at university, with my bookworm's proboscis boring into very different sorts of books than those I addle my brain with these days. I was into ancient Terran history—I couldn't help it, being named for the mythological muse of history. The puzzle was the thing, taking a shred of this and finding the scraps of that, ultimately sewing together a patchwork with the threads of my imagination. Until one day, when things fell apart.
Musa, mihi causas memora. . . .
Well, our own Great War came, and vengeful Juno laid waste to my Phrygian citadel, and cast me into that dire strait between Scylla and Charybdis. The universities were emptied into the academies, and me with them. You know, in the day of Wilfred Owen, it was anathema for a woman to bear arma pro patria, unthinkable that a woman might be able or willing to kill the product of another woman's womb. Of course, it was still unthinkable then that a woman might vote or hold a job of her own, and among the handful of professions then open to us, Mrs Warren's was probably the best-represented. Sooner or later, it was decided that the female of the species was at least as deadly as the male. At any rate, it was my education rather than my gender which spared me from a fast-track into the infantry.
Or so I thought.
There will be time, there will be time,
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate.
Too much education can be a bad thing, because it proves that you can be taught to do things. Like inserting an ad infinitum virus into a security sensor's logic subroutine with a programmed pen laser rig. Like finding the right weight-bearing member of a superstructure to bring the whole thing down with a minimal charge. Like how to improvise anti-personnel charges from spent bullet casings and chewing gum. Like the difference between the yields of various WMDs, as counted in gross percentage of biological eradication over global areas. Or how to land a transport in such a way as to either shield or flash fry ground contacts. I learned how to be my very own knight in shining armor, only with a large-bore autocannon and ECM suite instead of a cruciform sword and a kite shield. I learned my acronyms and euphemisms. Then I learned how to hide all these things inside a young woman's body, behind eyes too old to be innocent. Sunglasses help.
You must say, when reporting:
At five o'clock in the central sector is a dozen
Of what appear to be animals; whatever you do,
Don't call the bleeders sheep.
The most shocking thing about my training was how easily it all came to me. I had always prided myself on enjoying any subject taught me. And when my subjects so suddenly changed, I couldn't shut it off. With an earnestness bordering on the perverse, I learned to kill at a distance, to kill close up, to kill by 'helpful suggestion,' to kill with naked lies, to kill one at a time, to kill by the dozen, or hundred, or thousand. I learned to kill with a smile, that little grin that comes from accomplishment.
Only the serpent in the dust
Wriggling and crawling,
Grinned an evil grin and thrust
His tongue out with its fork.
I've bought in, for the long haul. There will indeed be time to murder and create. I tell myself that I'm on the right side, just as the other side's soldiers tell themselves. It all comes back to Horace, I guess. People have always gone to war over territory and resources, when it all comes down to it. Same likely goes for all the xenos, too. So as part of a nation, I say, better ours than theirs.
Horace wrote those timeless lines when all our eggs lay in one basket, on a world everyone knew was flat, around which the Universe slowly spun in a nightly kaleidoscope of connect-the-dot titans and frame-frozen tragedies. A man was lucky to live to thirty, a woman to twenty, so maybe the old poet was onto something. To die so that others might live to sing your deeds may have been the only immortality a Roman might aspire to.
Nearly two millenia later, a soldier named Wilfred Owen remembered these lines while sitting in a French trench up to his waist in blood and mud, and with a bayonet pen he added an equally timeless addendum:
The old lie.
For the Great War decimated a generation, yet nothing was decided, nobody really 'won,' and hatred so filled the hearts of Tommy and Jerry that it was only really a question of when the next war would come. This has largely been the legacy of every war fought since.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Ten years ago, I was at university, with my bookworm's proboscis boring into very different sorts of books than those I addle my brain with these days. I was into ancient Terran history—I couldn't help it, being named for the mythological muse of history. The puzzle was the thing, taking a shred of this and finding the scraps of that, ultimately sewing together a patchwork with the threads of my imagination. Until one day, when things fell apart.
Musa, mihi causas memora. . . .
Well, our own Great War came, and vengeful Juno laid waste to my Phrygian citadel, and cast me into that dire strait between Scylla and Charybdis. The universities were emptied into the academies, and me with them. You know, in the day of Wilfred Owen, it was anathema for a woman to bear arma pro patria, unthinkable that a woman might be able or willing to kill the product of another woman's womb. Of course, it was still unthinkable then that a woman might vote or hold a job of her own, and among the handful of professions then open to us, Mrs Warren's was probably the best-represented. Sooner or later, it was decided that the female of the species was at least as deadly as the male. At any rate, it was my education rather than my gender which spared me from a fast-track into the infantry.
Or so I thought.
There will be time, there will be time,
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate.
Too much education can be a bad thing, because it proves that you can be taught to do things. Like inserting an ad infinitum virus into a security sensor's logic subroutine with a programmed pen laser rig. Like finding the right weight-bearing member of a superstructure to bring the whole thing down with a minimal charge. Like how to improvise anti-personnel charges from spent bullet casings and chewing gum. Like the difference between the yields of various WMDs, as counted in gross percentage of biological eradication over global areas. Or how to land a transport in such a way as to either shield or flash fry ground contacts. I learned how to be my very own knight in shining armor, only with a large-bore autocannon and ECM suite instead of a cruciform sword and a kite shield. I learned my acronyms and euphemisms. Then I learned how to hide all these things inside a young woman's body, behind eyes too old to be innocent. Sunglasses help.
You must say, when reporting:
At five o'clock in the central sector is a dozen
Of what appear to be animals; whatever you do,
Don't call the bleeders sheep.
The most shocking thing about my training was how easily it all came to me. I had always prided myself on enjoying any subject taught me. And when my subjects so suddenly changed, I couldn't shut it off. With an earnestness bordering on the perverse, I learned to kill at a distance, to kill close up, to kill by 'helpful suggestion,' to kill with naked lies, to kill one at a time, to kill by the dozen, or hundred, or thousand. I learned to kill with a smile, that little grin that comes from accomplishment.
Only the serpent in the dust
Wriggling and crawling,
Grinned an evil grin and thrust
His tongue out with its fork.
I've bought in, for the long haul. There will indeed be time to murder and create. I tell myself that I'm on the right side, just as the other side's soldiers tell themselves. It all comes back to Horace, I guess. People have always gone to war over territory and resources, when it all comes down to it. Same likely goes for all the xenos, too. So as part of a nation, I say, better ours than theirs.