"It's at Night that I Ask the Questions" Part 3/4 - Politics & War

[drexer]

Ok, I'm keeping this on a timely schedule. I'd hoped to have the last two posts ready today as the ending allows me to make a parable quite easily with SOPA and censorship, but that will have to wait.



Part 1
Part 2

We ended the last chapter with the young man having joined the army to fight in the first world war. There is quite a bit of politics and history in the beginning of this chapter, but I've opted to focus on the second more graphical part of this small chapter here, so we'll be skipping that(it would just be a huge text dump to be honest as I'm not such a good teller when it comes to the history of my country).

I should note that this is my favourite chapter both due to the subject matter of it as well as the art which complements the concept and the terror of war in a way which I haven't seen that many books do as perfectly. The following pages are just that, some of my favourite of the whole book and believe me, it pained me to reduce them to just 4.


Part 3 - Controversial Path
(drawn by André Coelho)

As before, all translations are done by me, as unfortunately there is no English version I can point you towards

Please remember that this is written from the perspective of an old man telling his youth in a letter to his son.

Our character, an educate upper-classmen from the capital gains a great friend during the war, a poor illiterate from a small interior village who had no one back at home waiting for him. They moved through boat and train towards their goal, trained in war by Englishmen who 'didn't like them, but were polite'. In the end, they find themselves on the trenches, with a question asked to our character:



The following is lifted from the letter the character is writing in the future to his son, represented in the panels by the text inside the rectangles:

"At that time we didn't knew what men is capable of doing to each other. To you the war is a fantasy. Maybe an adventure. But I was there!... I saw!"

"Do you know what silence is? Silence is life! While there is silence..."

"You can't hear the noise of death."

He wakes up with screams of a gas attack, hurriedly putting on his mask just as a shot lands near him on the trenches.







He returns to his home two years after being injured. The Republic is still standing. His father did not tell him anything; and his mother had died just the year before, perhaps with fear of never seeing him again.

Next time, things get better(for certain purviews of better), and things get worse(for many definitions of worse).

Comments

[salinea]

Damn.