Conversation on 'And they fight'

 Francoise:

"When I read the text for the first time, I had not paid attention to the date, 2015.

Putting aside the mention of some specific places anchoring the facts in a specific context ("wilderness of rarified heights"), the text is striking for its universality and plunges my reading into the atrocity of a present war where combatants strive to survive in the horrific "intimacy" of what only they witness, the anonymity of pain, loss and suffering.

Stirring write for its capacity to take the reader right on the scenes of the war, and in the minds of the fighters"

Sushama:

" My brother-in-law retired from Indian Army as Major General. He told us what it really means for the soldier by loyalty. He said that in the immediacy of fighting the loyalty is not towards that abstraction called nation. It's towards the battalion, and the fellow soldiers. and that covers all things."

Fancoise:

Yes, I understand that very well, Sushama, and admire it.

There are many letters left by the French soldiers during WWI expressing the immediacy of fighting in the trenches and how deep the care and attention to fellow fighters was. These soldiers's letters have been studied in school as an example of one of the highest forms of good behaviour

These French fighters are referred to as "les poilus", the hairy men, as unshaved.

Most French families own letters from them. We have a few that we have kept preciously and they are stories of silent bravory and untold heroic acts.

I totally understand the idea of immediacy that you mention in the poem: it definitely has a universal echo.

Bruce Roberts:

"So grieved. So many die. So much grief. So little consideration or consolation."

Hamid Ben

"War is always an abomination, so many lives sacrificed, wasted existence of tragic destinies. No cause should, in principle, justify the carnage but reality being what it is, appetites, greed... the fighter finds himself engulfed in a dynamic he can no longer control, the survival of himself and his comrades-in-arms becomes the utmost priority. Thank you for your text, thinking about a burning and current topic"

Francoise:  "A laudable bravery, an acute sense of duty, and a depersonification of war driven to the paroxysm of detachment. And behind all this, the poet shouts a suppressed anger, muffled and silent. Crude and uncompromising but humane and poignant."