Once upon a time the killing stopped and the dying started. This may have been one of the times when The Almighty, as he is sometimes called, laughed, since we read that he who sits in the heavens sometimes laughs. But maybe he laughs at other things, and doesn’t really find this all that funny, since we read that The Almighty isn’t all that happy with the death of even the wicked. And I’m not sure even I find it all that funny – that the dying started for those who had been doing the killing – although I see a certain irony in someone who has been kicking someone’s butt suddenly finding he has run into a ten ton gorilla who wants to kick butt.
Since I figure he never got in any kind of a fight, I figure Fredrich Neitzche, the “Will to Power” guy, never ran into a ten ton gorilla after he had been kicking someone’s butt. But I suspect Napoleon might have thought about what it would be like to run into a ten ton gorilla if he hadn’t gotten real drunk and told his driver to haul his carriage from Moscow to France real fast. I’m sure some soldiers he left behind thought about what it was like to be chased by a ten ton gorilla, though, as they ran after his carriage.
War game analysts have long analyzed the advantages of being on the offensive, of attacking in war: The defending army probably doesn’t know exactly when or where the attacking army will attack, and you may catch a defending army sleeping, or like George Washington you may find the enemy drunk or hung over like he found the Hessian troops the day after Christmas in Trenton, New Jersey. I understand tacticians have listed other advantages of being on the offensive, but if you are a regular old soldier on the offensive, one of your major advantages is that if you are wounded as you move forward you can expect an ambulance driver to pick you up pretty soon, and you may even find you have received a million dollar wound, a wound that will get you out of combat, and into a soft bed with clean sheets in a hospital.
If you’re on the defensive, on the other hand, if you’re one of the guys retreating, you do not expect your ambulance drivers to pick you up at all. If you are wounded you can expect to be overrun, and find yourself behind the enemy’s lines where your side’s ambulance drivers don’t want to go. You might expect the guys you are fighting, the guys overrunning your position, to maybe shoot you, since they are full of adrenaline, and no doubt pretty scared since you guys retreating have just been shooting at them. And they may be really mad if they think you have just shot one of their buddies. So instead of being picked up by an ambulance, or told to line up for lunch, your odds are pretty good of just being shot and killed if you are overrun while trying to retreat.
But the guys moving forward, the guys on the offensive, even though they may be really scared and full of adrenaline, are probably not as apt to get shot in the first place since the guys they are chasing often have to look over their shoulders to see them at all, and probably aren’t shooting real straight. But as I said, if the guys doing the chasing are shot, they can hope to be picked up by a friendly ambulance, and taken to clean sheets in the rear.
And of course armies often advance on an enemy when the enemy isn’t all that strong anyway, and is mostly running away, and your side is doing all the killing. Then you probably won’t need an ambulance to pick you up because you probably won’t get shot anyway. Something like this can be seen as a fun war. I suspect some of Hitler’s troops thought their war was almost fun in the year 1939 as they kicked butt and bombed Polish cities into oblivion to see how the civilians would react – to see if they would just give up or get mad and keep on fighting.
Some Japanese were already enjoying their war with China by 1939. They had already advanced through Nanking, chaining Chinamen to big guns so they could drag them all over China until they dropped dead. When these Chinamen wouldn’t drop dead, these Japanese sometimes practiced an old Japanese art of beheading enemies, or stabbing them with their bayonets. They probably experienced something of an adrenaline high, a “runner’s high” as they call it in the runner’s world – and yes, they were sometimes scared as well, but they were doing the killing, and Chinamen were doing the dying, so it wasn’t all that bad, and generally it was kind of exciting, and sometimes almost fun.
But later all that changed. The Germans who had kicked butt for a hundred miles through Poland, several hundred miles through Holland and France, and lots of hundreds of miles as they advanced through Russia, finally ran out of steam, or should I say they ran out of petrol, and after it got cold all the petrol they still had froze into something like jelly in their fuel lines so their diesel engines wouldn’t start, and they couldn’t turn the turrents on their tanks to point their tank’s guns, or turn the tracks on their tanks to take them back home to Germany. And if they weren’t killed when the Russians overran them and their tanks, 95% of them later died digging coal in Russian mines or cutting down trees in Russian forests or something.
And the dying started, and they became a pretty good example of a prediction that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. They were also a pretty good example of what I have heard called the “law of the harvest” that says “you reap what you sow.” Later, just like lots of Polish kids had died when Germans bombed Polish towns, lots of German kids died when the Allies bombed Cologne and Dresden and, ….
And we might note that just like lots of Chinese kids died when the Japanese invaded China, lots of Japanese kids died when the Allies bombed Tokyo and Kobe, and Yokohama and Osaka, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Alternative Endings
I sure hope our shock and awe shocks and awes only bad guys.