The story is written by Sam Mendes based on what his grandfather told him. Mendes' grandfather was a soldier in the Trench War, and this offering is in his honour for his heroic act of treading through the dangers of the enemy-line and the perils of Nature to pass over a piece of vital information to the advancing army. His deed indeed saved the day and many fellow comrades.

I am a little perplexed. On the one hand, I am taught that violence is the primitive way of settling an issue. Violence can never solve any problems but instead, create new ones. An eye for an eye leaves the whole blind, they say. Yet in the same breath, the same people proclaim that turning the other cheek is stupidity.

All through our civilisation, war has been part and parcel of our evolution. With each significant catastrophe that we go through, the human race seems to go up one notch in terms of scientific achievement. War propels the world forward. War stimulates the economy, and the desire to dominate is one thing that gives pride. We form tribes and fall in line under a piece of cloth to provide us with a sense of pride to uphold.

In a war, we say, everyone loses but yet, we are ever ready to justify the mother of all battles to end wars. We know where it led us.

The promise of wealth and power is good enough reason for us to get up in the morning and plunge ourselves into the conveyer belt that would send us all to the hole of destruction. We repeatedly justify our resort to extinction as a means to settle scores by putting the blame on Nature. Even our Universe is rough in its actions. Scorching expulsions of magma, destructive clash of meteorites, earth-shattering movements of tectonic plates and extremes of temperatures proves that the world is no pleasure cruise.