Before the Battle

The armies stand drawn up against each other.

The banners stream in the wind of the sunny morning and their shadows fall across the warriors’ faces. At once they summon us to courage and to fury. In one and the same gust they manage to foretell both immortality and death. No one is moved now by any words. By any appeals. We cling only to overcoming our healthy fear, the guardian of life. And we do not want life. We want death. Our death does not love healthy fear. It hates it. It wants to strangle it before it can save us… We no longer desire such salvation.

It is probably too late now to change anything at all. Behind us now lie the moments of clamour, of quarrels, of appeals to reason and love that held us back from battle. We would not bow our heads before the enemy. Nor did he bow his head before us. And so today we rise against each other. As proud and as foolish as we are strong and mighty. We have wound tangled labyrinths out of the good and the evil in us. And we shall grapple with one another. On one and the same day we shall sow the seeds both of age-old legends and of eternal ignominy. For the victors and for the vanquished. To each his own… We ought to sing the moment when we became enemies. Not the coming battle. It deserves no songs. The most epic moment is the one in which pride and hatred gained the upper hand. Everything else is scenery and consequence. Those who sing the battle itself have no idea for whom or for what they are singing. They remain blind to the true beauty of human strength and weakness. Blind men painting the picture of life in the colours of death.

This day repeats itself at the four corners of the world. In the west, in the north, in the east and in the south, just like me, in their own mornings and beneath their own banners, have stood the upright samurai and the bronze warriors, men of the white northern wastes and of the deserts scorched by the blazing sun. And each of them lived through this same moment of his own. He wrestled with his weakness and found the way to stand firm and to master his fear. The life-giving fear, the sentry of life. And so, now utterly defenceless, the warrior will surge forward, accepting his own death and the death of others. Is this a healthy, life-giving force or a predatory disease? What seizes the mind and makes it sacrifice life? Life in exchange for what? Some idea, or the homeland? Or a people? Or a faith? A family? Both the romantic defender and the predatory attacker have chosen their reasons. Each of them has felt what I feel now. He knows why he has come this far, but the madness that grips him in the moment before the battle begins wipes out every reason. In the last moment before the clash, total silence falls.

Logic, reason’s feeble herb-woman, now sits silently to one side of our ranks. She rummages hurriedly in her untied bag of herbs and remedies. In vain she searches for the herb against hatred. And at last she admits defeat. She too fixes a grieving gaze on our unseeing eyes and waves us farewell.

The cure is not in peace. Nor in the potion of calm. It cannot replace the taste of the battle we thirst for. While war is in us, neither peace nor calm can possess us. Like a half-invisible, feeble ghost, their image passes through the hilts of our weapons without being able to touch them. War rages in us. Almighty, it rules everything. Its searing flame guards us from the ghosts of peace and calm. While it is inside and strong, they cannot touch us. And every one of us is ready to die. And to kill. Our death and the death of others are one and the same gift. Possessed and thirsting for death, we make no distinction. Those who kept the ability to tell life from death were cursed long ago. And burned. We burned them. Them, the weak, because they were incurably sick with powerlessness and indecision. Of course, they called it reason and love. But we saw the truth behind their fictions. And we lit the pyres beneath them, because we feared the plague of powerlessness and the leprosy of indecision. The pure flame saved us. Of them nothing remained but the stench of half-burnt carrion mingled with the breath of ashes. After the battle we shall erase even the memory of them. So that nothing remains.

Only we remained, the healthy. Our descendants will write the songs of our great deed and will sing them while they prepare the next pyres beneath those infected with the leprosy of false reason and false love.

It is possible that we were wrong. That the others were right. But now it does not matter. Their voice and their will were weaker, and their truth and faith burned with them. The only good and evil left in existence are we and our enemies. They too have burned their weak and indecisive. Were it not so, they would not now stand against us, so strong and so resolute… Now only victory will have the final word. It will decide in whom lies the good and in whom the evil.

Everything falls still. Now I summon all my courage. I need nothing else in the face of death and immortality. With a single movement I raise the hand that grips my weapon and erase every thought and every memory. The warrior in me is wholly ready. Nothing is left in me but him. Even before the battle I have already conquered both myself and my enemy.