Page 5 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

The Great Wars

The War Zone

The entire nervous plane seems to have swept down upon
earth; but in its form of power, of force, it is localised in the area
of combat.
Elsewhere, behind the lines or in the neutral countries, this
plane has embodied itself mainly in its form of weakness, nervous
tension, feverishness, impatience, unruly imagination, frittering
away all energies for action. All those who are not fighting feel
bereft of the tremendous power which is driving — sometimes to
the point of literally maddening them — those who are fighting
and killing each other.
All those who go into the war zone — a clearly defined zone
from the point of view of the active influences and atmosphere —
are seized, carried away, impersonalised in a formidable current,
as impetuous as a raging ocean. They are disindividualised, as it
were, reduced to an elemental state, to the state of natural forces
which, like the wind, the storm or the waters, accomplish their
earthly work, moved by a Will of which they are unconscious. They
are no longer men but masses that move and act; and even the
innumerable instances which seem to spring from courage, from
individual heroism, are yet akin to the heroism of bees or ants —
almost mechanical gestures, instinctive gestures induced in an
isolated element by the collective consciousness of the genius of
the race.
CWM 2: 142-43 The Mother

All India Magazine, October 2025 5