Literature Network » Daniel Defoe

Bloodless Casualties

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From: The Washington Post
Date: 19910208
Author:HAYNES JOHNSON

In his classic "Journal of a Plague Year," Daniel Defoe sketches a chilling scene of a great city shuttered and still, its silence broken only by continual tolling of bells and cries from the streets of "Bring out your dead!" heralding arrival of more carts heaped with bodies.

That description becomes all the more terrible because it signifies that people have learned to accept the unacceptable. It is a condition common to all calamities involving heavy loss of life and mass destruction, whether they stem from unavoidable natural causes such as earthquakes or plagues or from human ones such ...

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