In the collective imagination, we associate peace and finding peace with a culmination, the end of a quest or a long journey, a calm place where one can relax, a secluded spot hidden from prying eyes and anxieties. In our modern, hyper-connected societies, peace is primarily about calm, silence, and newfound happiness—inner peace after a long journey of reflection and self-questioning.

However, finding peace can also be associated with the brutal release from suffering, a torture we endure and are powerless to stop, the end of a nightmare or a living hell. A nightmare that began on August 3, 1914, and a living hell that began on February 21, 1916. An uninterrupted hell of suffering, death, hatred, and desolation, perpetrated by men against other men. Far from the patriotic songs and ceremonial marches, the flower in the rifle barrel, of the summer of 1914, when people still dreamed of romantic Napoleonic epics, grand cavalry cavalcades, and flags waving in the wind, the reality of modern, industrial warfare was revealed before the helpless eyes of the peasants and workers in the countryside, who discovered the reality of the industrial revolution: a human slaughterhouse on an industrial scale.

In these conditions of anguish, horror, fear, terror, hunger, death, violence, disease, and madness, a shell unearths a body, then covers it again, relentlessly, like the ebb and flow of the sea and the tides, a sea of ​​death against a backdrop of waves of suffering. A human body one day, a fragment by evening, a shapeless mangled mess the next. "Blessed are the dead," as they say. Happy, perhaps not, but certainly at peace, at peace from no longer enduring this indescribable hell. We can imagine what a soldier, dead in this hell on Earth, would think, writing from heaven to his mother: "Dear Mother, I have found peace..."

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