02:48

A officer, curious about his tools, examines a gas grenade. There is a battlefield behind him. He has just found the orphan and abandoned grenade while walking along the field edge, thinking about the crops, and seeds that will have to be buried so that the harvest can grow. This is the way officers think, in riddles and parables derived from their education, but always put to practical purpose. Not educated in quite the same way, we might find conversation with such a man (or at least a literal transcription of his momentary, verbal thoughts) somewhat mysterious, like a poem from a burned anti-bible. What, for instance, is the seed? The grenade? Or something or someone else, buried blank, or against its will? Since we are relatively immortal, compared to the amount of time we'll pay to this picture, an entire relative age will pass while we ponder these meanings, and meanwhile the officer will have moved on to other, equally confusing thoughts and duties (which we'll never know about). Now, though only a second has passed for us, it is already tomorrow for him, and the grass behind him has already all been mowed down by assiduous farmer soldiers in the units under his command (and that was his command... Mow The Field, Troops!). The mowing of the hay has flattened the hills and removed the bump of the horizon, so that now we can see far away, to the sight of a near large city visible as a jagged bump beyond the now-linear horizon. The officer's war will have moved on, in that direction.