![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Armistice
"On the 11th hour, of the 11th day of the year 1918 all fighting shall cease on the Western Front"
And so came the Armistice. The peace of the world was to follow. It had been a war, to end all wars.
But it wasn't.
My grandfather fought in it. He's dead now. He's been dead for almost 35 years. I never knew him. There are pictures of me on his knee. A red-haired boy, pudgy and round, all smiles and bright-eyes; a stocky man, jovial, with a large face and a wreath of faded hair around his pate.
But what dreams? He was a scout/sniper in the war. A runner, tasked with bring messages to The Front, and back again. My mother says he only lost one... oddly enoug it turned up in a dresser, in Cleveland, years later. It reads, On the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the year 1918..."
I wonder what it meant to him... that piece of paper.
I wonder less now, and more.
Today is painful for me. I see things. Poems I used to admire, I feel.
Glory of Women
Siegfried Sassoon
You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.
You can’t believe that British troops ‘retire’
When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
People like Wilfred Owen. His "Dulce et Decorum" is the canonic poem of the war. Because that war showed the horror of battle, in a way the people who had never been besieged could appreciate.
But horror fades. Honor and glory come back, tarnished, and battered (though they can be beaten true to form, and burnished up again, it isn't done by those who send, but rather those who do... and they are mocked for it) and the nations' minds turn back to war as an action, not a reaction.
I would (and do) rather offer the end of my favorite poem of Wilfred Owen.
Apoligia pro poemate meo
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 the trembling of a flare,
And heaven but as the 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.
The rest, is silence.
And so came the Armistice. The peace of the world was to follow. It had been a war, to end all wars.
But it wasn't.
My grandfather fought in it. He's dead now. He's been dead for almost 35 years. I never knew him. There are pictures of me on his knee. A red-haired boy, pudgy and round, all smiles and bright-eyes; a stocky man, jovial, with a large face and a wreath of faded hair around his pate.
But what dreams? He was a scout/sniper in the war. A runner, tasked with bring messages to The Front, and back again. My mother says he only lost one... oddly enoug it turned up in a dresser, in Cleveland, years later. It reads, On the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the year 1918..."
I wonder what it meant to him... that piece of paper.
I wonder less now, and more.
Today is painful for me. I see things. Poems I used to admire, I feel.
Glory of Women
Siegfried Sassoon
You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.
You can’t believe that British troops ‘retire’
When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
People like Wilfred Owen. His "Dulce et Decorum" is the canonic poem of the war. Because that war showed the horror of battle, in a way the people who had never been besieged could appreciate.
But horror fades. Honor and glory come back, tarnished, and battered (though they can be beaten true to form, and burnished up again, it isn't done by those who send, but rather those who do... and they are mocked for it) and the nations' minds turn back to war as an action, not a reaction.
I would (and do) rather offer the end of my favorite poem of Wilfred Owen.
Apoligia pro poemate meo
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 the trembling of a flare,
And heaven but as the 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.
The rest, is silence.