DESCRIPTIVE MEMORY

The war of religious nature lasts for many years. Youth is sacrificed in the front lines; cities are sacked by famished and desperate men, while soldiers submit themselves to different flags without the clear understanding of the motives that lead them to make war, to hate and to kill.

The beginning of the play is marked by the arguments that differentiate war and peace, inscribed in the dialogs between a recruiter and a sergeant: “Peace is rubbish; it is the war that establishes the order. In peace, humanity develops like weed. It’s a waste of people and of cattle, just like that” and “as everything that is good, war is also hard, at the beginning. But once it flourishes it is a plant that resists everything; people tremble only to think about peace, like players, who don’t want to stop so that they don’t have to calculate their losses.

Mother Courage is a woman that sells to the soldiers, whom she follows marching in her cart, groceries, drinks, clothing, information and promises of favours and even of other things never really verified. She lives off the war and off her opportunity businesses, buying what the farmers and the cities’ disinherited need to sell to survive another day, this way feeding the children and whoever comes to leech her.

The sergeant shows the ambiguity of the woman: “So, to you, the war shall grit the bones and leave the meat? You fatten your cubs with the war and don’t wish to give anything in return? He needs to know where the food comes from…” Still, she is sure: “But the soldiers do not need to be my children.” Eilif, the eldest son is harassed to enlist straight from the beginning and ends up becoming firstly a hero and later for the same reasons a war assassin, which leads him to the firing squad. He’s not able to say goodbye to his mom and dies without understanding the difference between peace and war. Mother Courage never found out about this son’s death.

Swiss Cheese, the middle son, “the most naive but the most honest”, is shot for hiding the regiment’ safe that he was in charge of in a moment in which the war turned around and for having refused to say where he had thrown it. His mother later, before the body, is forced to pretend that she doesn’t recognise him in order to survive.

The chaplain, the cook and the whore, beings disfigured by the war that live together with Mother Courage by the cart, in some war times, keep following the journey through the inside of misery and poverty that the situation describes. It is left to Mother Courage her daughter Kattrin who dreams with the end of the war so that she can get married. By leaving her on her own at some farmers house, at the door of a city where she travels to do business, will end up by losing her as well. As the daughter realises that the enemy troops are about to invade the sleeping city, she climbs up to the roof playing a drum, ending up causing her own death. By killing her, the watchmen wake up and the city was able to defend itself, this way saving her mom’s life. Mother Courage finishes pulling the cart on her own restarting her journey to nowhere.