The Great Silence

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It's a Queer Time
Robert Graves

It's hard to know if you're alive or dead
When steel and fire go roaring through your head.

One moment you'll be crouching at your gun
Traversing, mowing heaps down half in fun :
The next, you choke and clutch at your right breast
No time to think leave all and off you go . . .
To Treasure Island where the Spice winds blow,
To lovely groves of mango, quince and lime
Breathe no good-bye, but ho, for the Rest West!
It's a queer time.

You're charging madly at them yeling 'Fag!'
When somehow something gives and your feet drag.
You fall and strike your head; yet feel no pain
And find . . . You're digging tunnels through the hay
In the Big Barn, 'cause it's a rainy day.
O springy hay, and lovely beams to climb!
You're back in the old sailor suit again.
It's a queer time.

Or you'll be dozing safe in your dug-out
A great roar the trench shakes and falls about
You're struggling, gasping, struggling, then . . . hullo!
Elsie comes tripping gaily down the trench,
Hanky to nose -- theat lyddite makes a stench
Getting her pinafore all over grime.
Funny! because she died ten years ago!
It's a queer time.

The trouble is, things happen much too quick;
Up jump the Boshes, rifles thump and click,
You stagger, and the whole scene fades away:
Even good Christians don't like passing straight
From Tipperary or their Hymn of Hate
To Alleluiah-chanting, and the chime
Of golden harps . . . and . . . I'm not well today . . .
It's a queer time.



We were caught in the shadows of a different time. Where the ferry waited at the flooded river. Where we were startled in our youth. At a time before the Great Silence descended. Before he got sick. There were so many imagined buildings, and he could hear the voices and the stories in each of the cubicle rooms. The ivy outside made the house look English. They looked up startled at his invisible presence; could feel something different in the air. He wanted to drape himself in everybody else's life. They could feel his shadow passing.

Without the divine river of alcohol and easy friends, he felt lost. There were always so many divine conspiracies. So much gossip. He was the subject of some of it. Before he became invisible. And sober. And the world didn't seem coloured in anymore. The gift that keeps on giving. From the soaring highs to the massive hangovers to the crushing depression. Keep on giving. Smeared against a wall. He didn't know who we was anymore. Then the feeling passed. Euphorica recall briefly took away perspective. And he pined for oblivion, as he walked past the drunk in the street, jealous of his freedom.

These days, these crucible, difficult days, were to last for quite some time, and came scurrying back often enough. His complete loss. The complete failure of belief. The desperate effort for so desperately little. He wasn't going to remember them this Christmas. There was going to be an agonisingly difficult time, he could feel it in his bones. Always this feeling of dread. But it couldn't have been for nothing. Would I abandon you now; at the end of your luck? He was going to rally. There was always a new dawn. And in simple phrases, simple language, find his heart, be true again; get away from his grimy, infiltrated soul.

We were up to all sorts of nonsense. We really were. Stepping over the bodies in the loungeroom late at night. Doing the dishes in the early hours, wired by excitement. He couldn't be more sure. The dankness had gone. He was going to hear Halleluyah and he was going to see the riot of angels, of colour, of event, of experience. These pasty dreams had gone on long enough. In that empty space. He was sure there was going to be an end. Cruel distinction. Flashes of the bars. How he sometimes longed for them. To be younger. To be someone else. He wasn't the deformed monster anymore, hobbling like a deformed dwarf, drunk, alcoholic, very bitter, very twisted, he wasn't that anymore. But you're going to get me, anyway.

The castles were giant and full of air, with their black chequered floors, etherial cathedrals; and he was able to find them if he so desired. The mistakes were so manifold, manifest, that he didn't know if he could ever climb back. Cruel shadows and a sick tear, the face in the pub house wall, the sneering voices of old queens who knew him when he was younger, slimmer, and the savage betrayal of everything and everyone, Bukowski, Ballard, Burroughs, betrayed by every hallucinatory dream and anguish, fantasy, to come crashing down while walking the fields of the abandoned nursery, picking daffodils for sale later in the day. A happy time.

Briefly, a happy time. Too many times he spent huddled in agony, watching the normal people flash past in their smart cars. That was the greatest disease. He could feel them creeping up now. And all was lost. Again. And he shook his golden locks for the sake of the security cameras. And he took up his old life in the park. Just as he had once watched the homeless with so much interest on his way to and from work, storing them up for future reference. Get out of the gutter and get on with it, he was told in no uncertain terms. The cold shower approach. Before the Great Silence set in like a frost, and he lost all heart.



THE BIGGER STORY:

MUMBAI, India (AP) — At first, waiter Joseph Joy Pulithara thought the blasts were rows of liquor bottles exploding for some reason behind the Mumbai hotel's sleek bar. Running to the scene, he found a woman screaming — and a young man spraying gunfire.

The gunman was a member of a team that was well-armed, well-prepared and had just begun a two-day siege that would shut down India's financial and entertainment capital, leave more than 150 people dead and 370 injured, and turn the city's ritzy seaside district into a scene of horror.

There was almost no time to escape. "Within two minutes, they were on us," Andreina Varagona of Nashville, Tenn., said from her hospital bed in the intensive care unit. Wounded in the right leg and right arm, her curly brown hair was still caked with a friend's blood two days later.

An Indian commando said the attackers were indiscriminate. "Whoever came in front of them, they fired."

There were 10 targets across the city, including two five-star hotels, a train station, a popular restaurant and an ultra-orthodox Jewish center.

Inside the Taj Mahal and the Oberoi hotels, with their hundreds of rooms, the gunmen often seemed to have the advantage.

"These people were very, very familiar with the hotel layouts and it appears they had carried out a survey before," said an unidentified member of India's Marine Commando unit, his face wrapped in a black mask.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5254262.ece

Commandos were tonight battling the last gunmen holed up in the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Bombay as one of the worst terrorist attacks in India’s history reached its bloody endgame.

The diplomatic fallout was just beginning, however, as India laid the blame for the attacks on Pakistan, its neighbour and rival, and an Indian official said that two of the militants were British Pakistanis.

British officials said they were investigating the possibility of such a link but had found no evidence.

India also faced criticism from Israel when five Israeli hostages were found dead inside a Jewish centre after a raid by commandos. An Israeli offer of assistance had been turned down.

Almost 36 hours after the attacks began, commandos from the elite Black Cats special forces unit abseiled on to the roof of Nariman House, one of the terrorists’ three main targets, which contains the Jewish centre.

Hopes of a swift and successful conclusion to the hostage crisis inside were dashed when three of those being held were killed as the commandos launched their raid with stun grenades and gunfire. Two more died as the forces tried to force their way on to the third and fourth floors, according to commandos’ leader.

Indian police said they had also taken control of the Oberoi hotel, killing two militants and freeing 143 people inside, mostly foreigners.

Their operations were tonight focused on the last one, or possibly two, militants who were moving between floors in the Taj, possibly with hostages.

India blamed Pakistan for the assault on its financial capital, in which at least 130 people, including 19 foreigners, died and 370 more were injured. “Preliminary evidence indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved,” Pranab Mukherjee, India’s Foreign Minister, said.



http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24724306-12377,00.html

INDIAN commandos were battling to end an assault on Mumbai by suspected Pakistan-based Islamic militants that has left up to 155 dead, among them foreign hostages.

Security forces were fighting it out inside the city's historic Taj Mahal hotel, where a tiny group of heavily armed gunmen where engaged in a fight to the death as the more than 52-hour-old battle entered its final stage.

Earlier, elite troops abseiled from helicopters and stormed a Mumbai Jewish centre and killed two gunmen - only to find five dead Israeli hostages, including a US-based rabbi and his wife.

National Security Guard chief J.K. Dutt said the captives had been murdered by the gunmen during the commando assault.

The other five-star hotel that was attacked - the Oberoi-Trident - was declared clear of militants, with scores of trapped guests rescued and 24 bodies found.

"They were the kind of people with no remorse - anybody and whomsoever came in front of them they fired," an Indian commando leader said of the young gunmen who slipped into India's economic capital on Thursday morning (Australian time).

"We could have got those terrorists but for so many hotel guests," he said.

Indian media reports said up to 155 people were dead and 327 others wounded. Nine militants were confirmed dead and one captured.