Well, I never got back to the trenches yesterday. People came over. There was food and conversation. Then there was sleep.
There is a historical line across France and Belgium, partially erased now, that was once two parallel ditches in the ground where millions of men lived and died in mud and smoke and fear.
For round numbers, let's just say that 10 million died during WWI. The loss is unimaginable. It's 1000 times the number of American soldiers who've died during this Iraq war. I say that not to minimize what's happening today but to magnify it, to find some way of coming to grips with the enormity of it.
I wonder sometimes about the parallel universe in which diplomacy was successful in 1914.