The world runs its weary way

[pecunium]

It's Armistice Day again. Today the new Veterans' Center at my school opened. There was bunting, and speeches. As I rushed to the library to print, and then deliver, a paper for English (I was defining the term, "classic" and then using any work of the imagination I liked to expand it), I looked at the light colonel on the stand, preaching about how US troops have been everywhere, securing freedam, yadda-yadda, and a couple of sergeants in Blues looking on from the back of the crowd... I was wearing my beret, and apparently muttering.

I don't think I'm disillusioned. I don't know that I've had any of the sorts of illusions needed for that sort of "loss of innocence". I'd read too much, talked to too many vets, read too much politics to think wars are "clean" (even when justified).

But the simmering jingoism, the idea we are some how special: that the US only fights, "good wars"... I was not pleased with the spectacle.

No, I am, on this day; this strange day, when England, and Scotland and Canada take a moment and recall the end of, "The Great War" and then append all the wars which have followed, great and small, ambivalent, at best, about the way we fetishise the "veteran". I don't need it.

I need money for school. I need better care in the VA. I want to think the promises of loyalty to the soldier, the widow, the orphan, are going to be kept.

Marna posted one of my favorite poems: A. E. Houseman's, Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.

I was such a mercenary (It meant one who volunteered, who fought for pay. The poem is about the First Battle of Ypres, after which the Long Service Army was, to all intents and purposes, hors de combat. It would take the entirety of the interwar years to get it back up to scratch, just in time to get plastered in the opening of WW2).

Were it not for those, "Mercenaries" the course of the Battle would have been much different.

But that's not the poem which today calls to mind for me. No, today is a Wilfred Owen sort of day.

Apologia pro poemate meo


I, too, saw God through mud—
The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.
War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,
And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

Merry it was to laugh there—
Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.
For power was on us as we slashed bones bare
Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

I, too, have dropped off fear—
Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,
And sailed my spirit surging, light and clear,
Past the entanglement where hopes lie strewn;

And witnessed exhultation—
Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl,
Shine and lift up with passion of oblation,
Seraphic for an hour, though they were foul.

I have made fellowships—
Untold of happy lovers in old song.
For love is not the binding of fair lips
With the soft silk of eyes that look and long.

By joy, whose ribbon slips,—
But wound with war's hard wire whose stakes are strong;
Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;
Knit in the webbing of the rifle-thong.

I have perceived much beauty
In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight;
Heard music in the silentness of duty;
Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.

Nevertheless, except you share
With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,
Whose world is but a trembling of a flare
And heaven but a highway for a shell,

You shall not hear their mirth:
You shall not come to think them well content
By any jest of mine. These men are worth
Your tears: You are not worth their merriment.