Drummer Boy at Shiloh revised

Imagine destruction. Chaos. Rubble and smoke. You can hear the screams of your fellow combatants and the whinnies of their lonely horses as they thud their hooves in distress. Losing everything you love, everything you ever loved. Imagine everything you know that is real about your life creating security for you, and then having it stripped away, leaving you shivering and exposed. Without your uniform, you are bare. You are just the child you were when you stepped into this war with nowhere else to go. Maybe you expected excitement and a place you could blend in with, to forget the hunger you were running from. Or perhaps you wanted the pleasure of hearing blaring trumpets when you came home. What you didn’t think about was that you might not come home. This is war.

Fortunately, I don’t have any personal experience with war, (, however I often think that I am engaged in never-ending combat battles with my younger sister not included).  Even so, I don’t believe war is right for anyoneever the right answer to a conflict. A quote by Voltaire says that “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” To me, this quote is very powerful. It speaks about the boys who are some too young to know any better, that are being celebrated to kill others. Because its alright if its for our country, right? During a war, no matter the color of the uniform, whoever wears it is just a boy , marching into battle, young and naïve, not knowing what he his getting himself into.

Before the battle, Joby, the 14-year-old drummer boy from “The Drummer Boy at Shiloh” by Ray Bradbury is found crying after he couldn’t sleep. He ran away to join the army in the first place, but I think he is starting to get cold feet, realizing that his “romantic dreams of battle” are maybe not what he was looking for. “’Well,’ said the voice quietly, “Here’s a soldier crying before the fight. Good. Get it over. Won’t be time once it all starts.’” (Page 51)  I think that what here the general is saying here is that, everyone gets nervous before a battle, but most many soldiers only realize that they shouldn’t have signed up, or are having second thoughts the very moment the fight is starting. When you get onto the field, there is no turning back, and it will be no use crying, because it won’t get you anywhere. If you are going to be upset, it is better to get it over with before the fight.

In the text, Ray Bradbury mentions that the soldiers are unable to sleep for they are restless for tomorrow’s battle. I think many of the soldiers are restless because tomorrow they change from scared and wide-eyed little boys, to men who kill. That is a scary thought for (if not everybody,) many (if not everybody) T, thhisat this battle might change everything that they believed in before, and everything that they are as a human being. “Beyond the thirty-three familiar shadows forty thousand men, exhausted by nervous expectation and unable to sleep for romantic dreams of battle yet unfought.” (Page 49) These boys don’t didn’t know what they are signingsigned up for. They all believed that what they are were about to plunge headlong into would be their big triumph.

The general knows that these boys aren’t necessarily ready to fight in war, and I think he tries to be understanding. Maybe once, years ago, he himself was in this situation, rushing into battle young and carefree. Now I imagine he has aged a bit, if not in years but then in experience, and that has left him with images and memories of the battlefield that will never leave his brainmind. Now it is his turn to train these “soldiers” who don’t know what is in store for them. “These lads, fresh out of the milk shed, don’t know what I know; and I can’t tell them- men actually die in war. So each is his own army. I gotta make one army out of them.” (Page 52-53)

Although war sometimes seems to be inevitable inI our world, I believe it should always be a last resort. It is never worth the cost of the lives of many innocent people like Joby. Even though times have changed, sadly the use of children child soldiers in war is sadly still pretty common around the world. What many boys like Joby didn’t realize was that even if they did managed to survive whichever war they were involved in, it still wouldn’t be over. They would be plagued for years after by images and memories from their time on the battlefield. I only hope, for their sakes, that those boys managed to feel as important to the war as Joby does by the end of th