Another poem of World War I:

    "The darkness crumbles away.  It is the same old druid Time as ever, only a live thing leaps my hand, a queer sardonic rat, as I pull the parapet's poppy to stick behind my ear.  Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew your cosmopolitan sympathies.  Now you have touched this English hand you will do the same to a German.  Soon, no doubt, it will be your pleasure to cross the sleeping green between.  It seems you inwardly grin as you pass strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes, less chanced than you for life, bonds to the whims of murder, sprawled in the bowels of the earth the torn fields of France.  What do you see in our eyes at the striking iron and flame hurled through still heavens?  What quaver--what heart aghast?  Poppies whose roots are in man's veins drop, and are ever dropping; but mine in my ear is safe--just a little white with dust."  ("Break of Day in the Trenches" by Isaac Rosenberg)

    As much of the world continues to believe that war is the ultimate solution to our political problems, we can learn much from Rosenberg's astute observations.  Of all of war's terrible manifestations, one of its most horrific is that it makes us forget who we most deeply are:  image bearers of God.

    No one is just a statistic.