Listening....
on a flat roof
there's a boy leaning against the wall of rain
aerial held high
calling "come on thunder, come on thunder"
From Sometimes (Lester Piggott) by James (1993)

Reading...
...Both the totality of the war efforts and the determination on both sides to wage war without limits and at whatever cost made its mark. Without it, the growing brutality and inhumanity of the twentieth century is difficult to explain. About this rising curve of barbarism after 1914 there is, unfortunately, no serious doubt. [One] reason... was the new impersonality of warfare, which turned killing and maiming into the remote consquence of pushing a button or moving a lever. Technology made its victims invisible, as people eviscerated by bayonets... could not be. Mild young men, who would certainly not have wished to plunge a bayonet in the belly of any pregnant village girl, could far more easily drop high explosive on London or Berlin, or nuclear bombs on Nagasaki. Hard working German bureaucrats who would certainly have found it repugnant to drive starving Jews into abbatoirs themselves, could work out the railway timetables for a regular supply of death-trains...

The greatest cruelties of our centry have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessities.
From The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm (Pantheon, 1994).