Veteran's Day

[kenjari]

So it's Veteran's Day. I don't have a day off from work, but I am, for some reason, thinking about the holiday more than I ever did before. I'm not exactly sure why. There's the obvious reason, that our country is currently at war and unfortunately likely to be for some time. Maybe it's having recently read Pat Barker's WWI trilogy. To mark the day, I am posting a poem, written by Siegfried Sassoon, who served in WWI. He is also the protagonist of Regeneration, the first book in Barker's trilogy.

Aftermath

Have you forgotten yet?...
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same--and War's a bloody game...
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz--
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench--
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'
Do you remember that hour of din before the attack--
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads--those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you'll never forget.

-Siegfried Sassoon(March 1919)

Comments

[iralith.livejournal.com]

Not appropriate to the reverent spirit of Veterans' Day, but for some reason the Sassoon poem that always really moved me, vis a vis the soldier's experience, was "The Hero." Which is dated and singsongy even for Sassoon, and on the face of it insulting as well . . . but in a way seems even more sympathetic because it depicts the awfulness and unfairness of the death of the least man. Or, you know, something.