I had never thought it would be like this....
I had stepped off to war with a grin....
I had waved, and smiled at my friends, thinking this opportunity was a bliss...
And now I am here, marching to Berlin...
Now I’m here, and I know how wrong I was, how wrong I have been...
There is nothing majestical, nothing honorable about this thing we call war....
It is simply romanticized, the truth hidden....
They don’t tell us about the misery, the grief, the gore...
They don’t tell us that because of the unremitting sound of the machine guns, our cries will be overridden...
They don’t tell us that there is nothing moral about killing an innocent just because he is on the other side....
They don’t tell us, they don’t tell us, they don’t tell us...
The rats, they live with us, they eat with us, sleep with us, sometimes I’m afraid that we too have become the rats....
We walk through a puddle and we contract trench foot, we itch at the lice and it stops for a minute and then it begins all again...
The pain it is so unbearable... the physical torture, but beyond that, the mental torment...
As night stretches into day and day into night, the agony filled shouts echo in my ears, the thud of bodies falling haunt me, the lifeless eyes stare back into mine...
And I wonder, what if that was me....
I wonder, what have I become, so heartless that death no longer scares me...
Death no longer scares me, but living does, life does...
My head pounds with all the secrets, the lies, the conspiracies...
I am tempted to be like the others, and inflict those “blighty wounds” on me...
But the photo and letters from my family stop the craziness; they give faith during these atrocities...
I look at their smiling faces and I know I cannot tell them this side...
I cannot tell them of a world in which there is no longer a right and a wrong...
No more black, no more white, just a gray...
I can just hope, hope that a day will come when human will uphold humanity and see...
See that war gains nothing, there are only losses...
See that war is nothing but a field of blood, despair, tears... of losses and only losses....