Where Have All the Flowers Gone?(Charles E.J. Moulton) Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

A Short Story by Charles E.J. Moulton

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One late autumn day, the war was over.
There was nothing specially extraordinary about that day, other than that the same grey bomb shelters competed with the ruins for attention. There were still parks and lakes for people to stroll in, but that morning the lovers did not have to sing their love songs louder than the alarm signals blasted out of the speakers.

After threats of more nuclear blasts, plans to backstab enemy prime ministers, there was a sudden understanding. And the world stood still.

The world was tired of war.

Fathers remembered what their grandfathers had told their children. They were now fathers of daughters who asked them how life had been like without fear.

"There was a time," grey haired men had told their grandchildren, "when we could play in the park, eat icecream and look up at a radiant sun without seeing a flying bomber. There was a time when we could wake up in the morning and look forward to a day in the countryside without having to worry about stepping on landmines."

Now, they could walk around freely again.
No red barons dropping grenades.
No green clad soldier breaking down doors.

Little girls with dirty pigtails walked out of their bunkers, looking at the grey and broken pavements. Kids smiled at each other again like their grandmothers used to, asking each other's names without having to fear that the other one would be telling an opposing official about possible traitors. They dared to approach each other and ask one another if the other one wanted to play.

Broken radio towers transmitted only weak signals, but the one available station transmitted one message.

"Peace in our time."

This was no fake peace or misunderstood peace.
Soldiers had no more ammunition.
The leaders had no more strength to fight. The harsh words made no more sense. The anger and the conflict had torn apart souls. Politicians had forgotten what they had been fighting for.
After four decades of screaming upon the barricades, the zest had worn out.

"We hate you," they had told each other, "but we don't know why. We abuse ourselves in the process, but forget to treat ourselves well. If I really love and trust myself, I have to love you in return."

Sons with torn uniforms returned to their homes, greeted by siblings and wives with smiles on their faces. Children came up to estranged men who were their fathers and told them that they had drawn a picture for them to hang on the wall.

"This is you holding a flower," one girl told her father.

Confusion, sheer confusion, ruled the hearts and minds of men. They had grown old with a hatred state of mind until hatred had no more backup, their souls empty, their hearts yearning for love.

Peace in our time, the radio kept transmitting.

Through the rubble, crisscrossing between fallen gravestones and passing destroyed houses, a five year old girl with newly washed locks and in a yellow dress walked past returning officers and families on exploded playgrounds.

She was holding a red flower in black earth, her little hands filled with dirt. She wasn't alone. A young woman, she could not have been more than 25 or 26 years of age, walked behind her with a small shovel. The man behind the young lady, he was most certainly in his early thirties, had a beard, an effort for him to look older, and carried a small sign with three words written on it.

The trio caught everyone's attention.
Two boys leaning against a statue of the Goddess of Peace with a missing arm looked up at the family, following their stride across a pedestrian crossing with their gazes. One of them upnodded the other and soon enough the family had ten or so followers, curious to see where they were going. No one knew where they were heading. But the twenty people walking behind them could only guess. The twenty followers soon became a hundred.

"My grandfather died over there," the little girl thought to herself as she walked with a solemn step toward the battle ground. "I never knew him. But I knew his words."

All of a sudden, the little girl stopped, her hands eager to hold the earth together, the earth with her grandfather's favorite flower in it.

"Here," she said, pointing with her free hand on a place on the ground.

The one word she uttered had the crowd uttering sounds of wonder, relief and confusion.

As the mother started digging a small hole in the grey blood ridden soil, she remembered grandfather's three words of enlightenment whenever she had been fighting with her at the time new husband. The young bride had been met by nothing but tolerance from her father about marrying a man five years her senior from the opposing enemy faction. No other words had ever been necessary.

The man behind her, the little girl's father, the young woman's husband, his life with his wife a revelation of love, had become hopeful once he saw how an older man from an enemy state invited him to live in his home with his 19 year old daughter. The words on the sign the man held in his hands represented truth.

The young husband set the cardboard sign glued to a piece of plywood in the ground as soon as the flower was planted. It was a welcome blotch of color on a stoney canvas of misery only feet away from the place where his father-in-law had died only months before his granddaughter was born.

Dropping bombs sometimes hit the wrong civilians.

The trio stood there for a long while with hands folded in prayer, the crowd quiet behind them. The soul of the grandfather joined his wife, the grandmother of the little girl. She had been a nurse who had been killed by a grenade tending to her dying husband.

As the sun broke through the clouds that day, it cast a ray of light on three words often spoken by the father in times of trouble, now written by a childish hand.

The sign read:

"Harmony and understanding."

And the radio station transmitted their one phrase about peace in our time.

As the crowd walked away from the battlefield with the lonely flower, they understood that peace was not political  but up to every individual.

"Peace begins at home," one boy told his friend on the way back to the broken Goddess.

The key word in their hearts was tolerance.

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