Icicle of Sleet

This afternoon, we went to see "They Shall Not Grow Old.", Peter Jackson's fix-up of archival WWI footage. It's really pretty amazing. At the same time, the amazing way it raises the dead past into living color makes it hard to watch. It brings home the crushing reality of what mechanized warfare does to human flesh. One of the voices from the war says, "By the end of the war, human life was worth nothing." And yet, of course, their lives were of infinite value to the men who lost them in the blink of an eye. The Sparrowhawk said he would not have wanted to miss it, but he wouldn't want to watch it again. One of the sharp impressions it made on me was how rotten the teeth of the English were, in living color. Barely out of their teens--still 16, many of them--yet their teeth were already rotting out of their heads. My god. The way a nation neglects the health of its citizens tells you a lot about the value of human life, even before the artillery. There's an observation that continues to bite in the present . . . .

My mother didn't answer her phone tonight. The Duchess will see her tomorrow, for which I'm glad.