The play continues in a similarly tragic manner as all the children are shot without having any real guilt to defend themselves against. The play ends symbolically with Mother Courage pulling the cart in which there are now fewer supplies and no children, an overwhelming imagistic that the war practically takes away everything you have dear and leaves you empty.

While Brecht's play is very direct and uses a lot of imagery in order to describe the tragedy of Europe during the war, Montaigne uses, in fact, a parallel analogy by describing, in fact, the cannibals and wars in that society. His description of the devastation of wars in Europe during his time (Montaigne dies at the end of the 16th century, so he is not able to live and describe the Thirty Years War) are in fact comparisons of wars in another society.

According to his work "Of Cannibals," wars in the cannibal society are "noble and generous, and have as much excuse and beauty as this human infirmity may admit: they aim at nought so much, and have no other foundation amongst them, but the mere jealousy of virtue."

With this comparative sentence, Montaigne follows on Brecht's footsteps in showing that the wars in Europe are exactly different from this. They do not have virtue as their primary motivation: they are rather political or religious confrontations, fights about enrichment (note again the fact that the Thirty Year War is as much directed against peasants as against anything else) and about growing one state against the lands of another. Despite many of the confrontations during that time in Europe being religious confrontation, there is really no sign of virtue in these: both the Catholics and the Protestants (as Brecht is keen to point...

Nevertheless, Montaigne is keen to underline that in the cannibals' barbarian approach, the killing of a prisoner tends to take a ritualistic approach. This does not necessarily justify the killing, but it certainly look more justifiable than the killing that occurs in Brecht's play. Here, all three children of Mother Courage are killed in absurd circumstances, without voluntarily participating to the conflict. Montaigne and Brecht are keen to emphasize that the conflict in Europe during these times is perhaps even more barbaric than that occurring in cannibalistic societies at any point.
In my opinion, both Montaigne and Brecht do an excellent job of painting European history at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century, although, in both cases, this is done in a subtle manner, with the focus on different things. With Montaigne, through his comparative perspective, his focus is more grand and an overall view is presented through his comparison of similar events in a different society, usually perceived as more barbaric. With Brecht, the focus is more on the individual suffering that the respective historical period brought in Europe and on the individual dramas that many of the citizens lived through.

Bibliography

1. Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays, vol. 5. Vintage Books, 1972

2. de Montaigne, Michel. On Cannibals.1580. On the Internet at http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/montaigne.html. Last retrieved on June 21, 2009