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Book: 'The Red Laughter'

Author.

Genre: short story

Publisher.

Rating (1 to 6): 5

In the last 3 years, the world has rapidly become a dangerous place. It may have been a gradual process, but we have felt it sharply on a global level. One serious threat to life as we know it has just ended and a new one is rising. The issue of global warming, the future of the world and of humanity in general, is hanging over our heads like a storm cloud. But instead of being able to deal with it, we are constantly inundated with new crises and new causes for concern. War, I have no doubt that everyone would agree, is a major such occasion at the moment.

War is a subject as old as the world. It is deeply ingrained in our human nature to want more, to fight to get it, or simply to need to feed the inner predator sleeping deep within us with more blood. War is woven tightly into human history and there are thousands of texts - fictional and historical - written about it, but the desire for it never seems to escape our nature. Humanity remains a (not so) "anonymous alcoholic" who constantly succumbs to his addiction, to the desire for more blood.

In the last ten years we have seen a valuable phenomenon - a boom in books and films about war. Plots unfolding tragedy after tragedy. For so long I have absorbed them with interest and pleasure, telling myself that history must be known in order to learn from it. Reassuring ourselves that since we continually absorb such content, we won't let it happen again. The world has refuted me. Humanity has disproved me.

I am now reading "The Red Laughter" by Leonid Andreev, written back in 1907, and my heart aches for the victims of the lessons we collectively fail to learn. The book tells the story of a young soldier and his days on the battlefield. Days, nights, moments that intertwine into a sense of eternity. An eternity filled with pain, fear and suffering. The scenes Leonid describes are shocking. They change a man so that they alter his human appearance, make him shudder in the face of death, accept it as natural, even if premature on the battlefield.

Immediately my head makes reference to "On the Western Front Nothing New" by Erich Maria Remarque, which I've already told you about here. Like Leonid Andreev, Remarque describes his battlefield experiences and the horror of war as experienced by himself. He describes a side of war that you cannot imagine unless you experience it. And it makes me suffer even more, as Remarque was a participant in WWI (1914-1918) and The Red Laugh was written 7 years before it began. This only confirms how deeply the desire to fight is embedded in the man and how little hope there is that he will ever fight it. That mankind would someday be "better", more peaceful, that people would live in harmony and without the desire for constant plunder and acquisition - whether of territory, power or money.

Read these books, it may be the only way, after all, in a Don Quixote way, to wrestle with our irreversible human fate and nature.