Musical Interlude: Sting, "Children's Crusade"

"poppies for young men..."

Gordon Sumner—Sting—wrote this antiwar song to commemorate the young casualties of World War One, who marched off full of idealistic illusions, so confident of early and easy victory; and also the victims of heroin, beckoned into addiction by their reckless decisions, and then degraded by the Drug War that criminalized them and increased their victimization.

We’re witnessing another war now, between Ukraine and Russia. I keep up by reading news articles and occasional newscasts, but I feel as far away from the reality of it as if I were on Mount Olympus. I read the casualty statistics and see snapshots of the destruction, but I don’t feel the terror, the grip of the mud, the stench of death.

What a horror it must be.

War and opium have an age-old linkage; In the Aeneid, the epic poem of the Trojan War, Homer referred to it as “the potent destroyer of grief.” Morphine, purified from the sap of the opium poppy, was first synthesized in 1803. The first hypodermic needle for intravenous injections was invented in 1853. The American Civil War was the first war where injectable morphine was widely used in field hospitals as an anesthetic and painkiller. What we now commonly refer to as “post-traumatic stress disorder” was commonly referred to as “battle fatigue.” So many Civil War soldiers turned to an opiate habit to alleviate their physical pain and mental distress that morphine addiction became known as “the soldier’s disease.”

Death-dealing technology increased rapidly between the end of the American Civil War and World War One; WW1 was the first major conflict where machine gun enfilade fire and long range artillery bombardment became mainstays on the battlefield. The age of physical valor was supplanted by the terrors of mechanized warfare: “battle fatigue” became “shell shock.” That’s the sort of death that’s commonly being dealt on the Ukrainian front: artillery duels, strategic advantage purchased by the concentration of superior firepower. For anyone on the ground in the field of fire, the sheer terror of utter helplessness.

I think it’s likely that the Ukro-Russian War will go down in history as an avoidable conflict, the tragic result of long-running diplomatic failure and peace opportunities squandered by chauvinism, hubris, and the absence in the corridors of State Power of any vision of the human future other than the inevitability of clashes of might between massed armed forces, forever. I share the position of Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne, who provide their reasoning in the June 2023 issue of Harper's magazine. Jack F. Matlock, former U.S. ambassador to Russia under Reagan and Bush I, provides more context here.

But whatever ones opinion of the necessity for this war, it’s on. And Americans like myself really don’t live as gods on Mount Olympus, beyond the clouds; notwithstanding the unreal aspect of our detachment and distance from the actual conditions on the ground, we are sharing the planet with this wholesale human-caused misery, and no less mortal than the soldiers dying in the trenches and the civilians getting caught in the line of fire. The consequences of millions of refugees, destruction of tens of thousands of homes and businesses, widespread environmental devastation, and hundreds of thousands already wounded and dead are bound to reverberate as aftershocks for decades into the future. Another one of those impacts will almost certainly be tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians seeking refuge in the painkilling, grief-destroying properties of opioids. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that both the naively idealistic illusions of war fever and the seductions of social fads in the use of forbidden drugs draw mostly on the innocence and unexamined assumptions of Youth to fill the ranks of the frontline recruits.