Late one evening - it may have been a year ago,
but probably wasn't - I was crossing a square in Warsaw. A boy was cycling around what was left of a once much bigger structure and two others were practicing a skateboarding trick nearby. Someone from a small group of tourists idiotically teased the soldiers who were in the middle of the changing of the guard. When I was close enough I slowed down and looked at a list of place-names on one of the pillars surrounding a flame that I must have overlooked before. When I'd gone through all the names, I moved on to another list, but I stopped half-way: that particular evening that was all the time I had for those guys who had fallen in so many wars that I so little understood; just like them, I guessed.Then I looked around and thought: "This is not what they had died for!", and I got extremely sad. But when I left behind the flame, the soldiers, the onlookers, I suddenly realised that it was not all in vain. Just like with the plaque on that pillar, I was overlooking a whole plane. What those young guys had fallen for was there, only not in the direction I was looking: the place is up there, a few yards above our heads. And perhaps if we climbed their tombstones and reached up as high as we can, we might be able to connect with the Poland* they'd been shot, pierced or blown to pieces for.
*because Poland is a spiritual project - or none at all; I mean: none worth mentioning.
( ...Kaniów 11 V 1918 ....St. Hilaire Le Garde (n. Reims) 25 VII 1918 ....Dyneburg 3 I 1920 ...Góra Świętej Anny 21-27 V 1921 ...Dyneburg 3 I 1920 ...Bzura 9-22 IX 1939 ...Narvik 12 V-6 VI 1940 ...Katyń-Charków-Miednoje 1940 ...Monte Cassino 11-25 V 1944 ....Bitwa o Anglię 10 VII-31 X 1940 ...Arnhem 18-25 IX 1944 ...Berlin 26 IV-2 V 1945 ...and a few more)
