I completely adore that movie, and I find that title perfectly effective here.

I was told this story last year. At my high school, all the Juniors have a day in which we learn directly from World War II veterans about what they experienced.

Unfortunately I didn't hear this story directly from its source – rather, from a student as she shared it in class after the event. This however, does not affect the beauty at all.


Sometime in World War II there is gunfire along a front. U.S. and German soldiers fight each other with machine guns, chemicals, tanks...all sorts of hell.

In between the tired, bloody masses of soldiers lies “no man's land,” a dead zone composed entirely of decomposing corpses, tangles of vicious barbed wire, fresh and dried blood, and a few wounded trying desperately to cling on to life.

One U.S. soldier, tired and weary from the bloodshed, notices something. A small shape moving through the dead land. A dog.

He stops firing. The other men can shoot if they want, but there's been so much bloodshed, so much Death...he just can't take killing an innocent animal.

The man next to him notices he's stopped. He looks out into the hellish graveyard and sees the dog as well, ambling into its own demise. And he stops firing, too. Soon several men have stopped firing...and then they notice. Those vicious, evil things they're fighting, whom they've been shooting at, a few of them have stopped too. And the dog's still alive - not only that, it's completely unscathed.

And they all watch this dog, no longer shooting.

All across the front, the gunfire slowly ceases...and stops. Soon there is no sound aside from the occasional whisper, and if your ears can still perceive such things after the explosions, maybe some paw-padding of the dog still crossing through the no man's land.

Entire armies stopped their mindless killing of each other, just for the sake of one single dog. They all knew they were ordered to kill each other, but they weren't ordered to kill dogs, and so the extra bloodshed just seemed downright wrong.

Eventually the gunfire did begin again, though the dog lived and got away perfectly unharmed. Thousands of people stood together to save the life of one, even when pinned against each other in a war.

So Life really is beautiful when people can do that. And when that war ended, soldiers on both sides, who were just moments before aiming to kill each other, ran into no man's land and hugged each other, crying and laughing and filled with so much emotion that they didn't know what to do with it. People who had never met - people who couldn't understand each others’ languages or their customs - people that they didn't even know the names of...all came together at the end of a bloody mess. Love prevailed.

I think this says something about the human race.

Yes, there is bad out there. There are wars and there is pain and suffering...but really, when you think about it, there's as much good out there as bad. Even more good, actually. All people have to do is come together, even for a small moment, and it is there.