At War44-03-0739The Weeping Wood

This is Words at War. This is my story in the story of an unfamiliar sound. It is the story of many people, some great and some insignificant as the world measures people, only a few of whom can be presented here.

People like these. I am a wealthy man. I have taken much and given little. I am part of the story. I am a priest. I have taken little and given much. Yet men have cheated me.

I am a businessman turned drunken. She did. They've even taken my self-respect. Me? I have tortured men and killed men. That is my way, that is my life. And I am part of the story.

Those are the people. This is the sound. Strange to your ears, the sound of tears dropping into a cup. But why? You find no strangeness in the song of a bird in a metal cage.

Both are unnatural, true, but both are the doings of men. And for the sake of his eternal greed and his eternal vanity, man has eternally done on natural things. I am the weeping wood, and I have made men kill.

I've made men torture and be tortured, and I have brought joy to the heart of a child. Men travel on wheels swiftly and silently because of me. I speak with the voice of a woman, because for me men have lied and cheated and worked and fought, because of my tears men have suffered and become poor, and men have prospered and

become rich. Not a strange set of circumstances when you know me. From my tears in the source of a substance, men call Robert. The National Broadcasting Company, in cooperation with the Council on Books in War Time, presents the 39th in Miss Words at War series.