(From the main feed “over there”; with my permission: “Quote of the Day”)
What, then, of this final stripping, this complete cleansing? The more one thinks about it, the worse it becomes. He got through so easily! No gradual misgivings, no doctor’s sentence, no nursing home, no operating theatre, no false hopes of life; sheer, instantaneous liberation. One moment it seemed to be all our world; the scream of bombs, the fall of houses, the stink and taste of high explosive on the lips and in the lungs, the feet burning with weariness, the heart cold with horrors, the brain reeling, the legs aching; next moment all this was gone, gone like a bad dream, never again to be of any account….How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous? I know what the creature was saying to itself!
‘Yes. Of course. It always was like this. All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottle-neck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold! you were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well. The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth was out. The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die and then you are beyond death. How could I ever have doubted it?’
~ C. S. Lewis. The Screwtape Letters, 1941, (pp. 172-173). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
For the Boys of Pont du Hoc, on the 73rd anniversary of D-Day and the Teufelhunde (Devil Dogs) of Belleau Wood on the 100th : anniversary: We Will Not Forget.



Some of us will not forget; others have already put it past them, like a bad dream, something to shudder at and momentarily fervently hope not to see or re-experience again. It would ruin the tone of the day.