Is All Really Quiet on the Western Front!?!

“Only a military hospital can really show you what war is […]. Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilisation weren’t even able to prevent this river of blood, couldn’t stop these torture chambers existing in their hundreds of thousands […]. And this is just one military hospital, just one – there are hundreds of thousands of them in Germany, hundreds of thousands of them in France, hundreds of thousands of them in Russia [or in any nation, for that case]. The war ruins the innocents of everything.”
-    Eric Maria Remarque. 
Looking at the present trajectory of geopolitics and the Gulf War, one is forced to think about the purpose of the human kind, or the meaning of life itself. For ages long, various writers and philosophers have made deliberate and conscious attempts to find the answers to such questions. Yet, more questions are to be considered and reconsidered from time and again. When the word questions is used, it means questions such as what is the real meaning of life, and for what has humankind formed? More often than not, the meaning of life or purpose is attached to status, power, and resources. Hence, in the attempts to achieve these entities, the human civilisations have initiated and participated in war. This also raises another philosophical question: What power actually is? Can power be attained through violence? In normal circumstances, one man killing another is seen as a crime and a punishable offence. But if the same situation is placed in the framework of war, one man killing another, and yet getting glory and praises for it, is a matter of national pride. Yes! That’s what war is. 
War, in its fundamental nature, is an act for perpetuating injustice; it is no different than legalised terrorism, which is funded by the political agencies. Moreover, it is also a question of great consideration: are the soldiers who are really fighting the wars? War, as a matter of fact, is never fought on the battlefield; rather, wars are initiated by a particular powerful group at the tables/meetings behind closed walls, at the cost of the innocent lives, be it of a soldier or civilian. The contemporary, ongoing war in the Middle East is an example of innocent lives being lost. Keeping the political aspects aside, the war itself is an absurd act. The irony of this war is that a leader of any superpower claims to attack the country and promises “freedom” to the people of the same nation. Perhaps, this is not so astonishing. Every nation that initiates war promises its citizens peace. Imagine a country going to war, attacking, dropping bombs, and launching missiles to attain peace. That is the definition of war: as Orwell states in one of the most famous, relevant, and futuristic novels, 1984, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.” 
The grotesque reality of a war is that it is always the innocent who pay the greatest price. The famous (erstwhile) proscribed novel by Eric Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, depicts the horror of war, which is also relevant to the present scenario. A few days back, a missile hit a military base that was located near a primary school, and 110 children lost their lives out of a total of 168 people, for whom the term casualty is used. The children who would have started their day by bidding goodbye to their parents and going to school had never thought of not being able to return to their homes again, not seeing their parents again, not being able to even get time to process what had happened to them. As Remarque’s novel fictionally presents a group of young college boys drafted into the military by glamorising war, completely unaware of the brutal realities of the war. When these realities struck hard, they were in a compromising position; unable to comprehend their situation, in a complete moral crisis. Many of them lose their lives by the end of the novel, including the protagonist. This fictionalised from has been transformed into reality by the killing of the school children. People/nations/soldiers have not been defeated, because as soldiers, nations, and civilians, they are not better and inexperienced, but simply because they have been crushed and pushed back by force(s) many times superior to theirs.
“After all, war is war.”