The paper's empty offices, mid-gutting, suggested the twin desolations of war and obsolescence.
The utter desolation, cynicism, and futility of war, as embodied in the arbitrary execution of three innocent French soldiers who have been tried and convicted of cowardice during a meaningless attack on a heavily fortified German position, comes through with simplicity and power.
Makhmalbaf's film (which, amazingly, she made at the age of nineteen and it was her second feature!), depicting wanderers, refugees, and permanent exiles, is set against the desolation of the Iran-Iraq war, and it culminates in a trip to Halabja, the Kurdish village that Saddam Hussein's armed forces subjected to a chemical-weapons attack in 1988.
Although the British thought that they had suffered an unimaginable loss, France had lost 1.4 million men from a smaller population, and in France the dominant tone of war memorials is desolation – Marianne grieving for her lost sons.
Such are the images of daily life for American troops fighting in Afghanistan: A clinically organized desolation, a war without the fight, a set of still lifes amid the violence, each day of their deployment.
A fine imaginative touch has this Glaswegian (plus plastic baby in a high chair) seeing her husband go off to war to the desolation of Glasvegas's Daddy's Gone sung by the cast.
Freedman, a veteran of the Korean War, emphasizes the emotions of war: the jingoism of the initial call-up of soldiers, the hatred unleashed by propaganda, the tedium and desolation of the trenches.
The full title Bingham gave the painting was "Civil War: as Realized in the Desolation of Border Counties of Missouri During the Operation of 'General Order No. 11,' Issued by Brigadier General Ewing, from his Head Quarters, Kansas City, August 25, 1863".
When we read the autobiography now, the village parade is a gorgeous panoply: Strachey "in a tangle of his own arms and legs," and Virginia Woolf playing bowls in the garden, the indefatigable Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the jungle, the fishermen, the labors of the Hogarth Press, the different desolations of the two wars, here the struggle, there the failure, here again the unusual triumph.
