Why Bush won

[ilw]

I saw this and thought it might be relevant to your chicken hawk discussion
The guardian did an article today on Siegfried Sassoon (British War poet during WW1), because an early war work of his has recently been discovered:

Because We Are Going


Because we are going from our wonted places

To be task-ridden by one shattering Aim,

And terror hides in all our laughing faces

That had no will to die, no thirst for fame,

Hear our last word. In Hell we seek for Heaven;

The agony of wounds shall make us clean;

And the failures of our sloth shall be forgiven

When Silence holds the songs that might have been,

And what we served remains, superb, unshaken,

England, our June of blossom that shines above

Disastrous War; for whom we have forsaken

Ways that were rich and gleeful and filled with love.

Thus are we heroes; since we might not choose

To live where Honour gave us life to lose.

Siegfried Sassoon (1915)

for sassoon thats a remarkably upbeat assessment, most likely because he hadn't been sent to the front yet. To contrast with his later work:

SUICIDE IN THE TRENCHES

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.


By: Siegfried Sassoon (1918)

Obviously WW1 for 3 years would be a lot more harrowing than a shortish term in Iraq, but I thought the shift in perception was food for thought.

[Biggles]

Sassoon and Owen make for grim reading - but they have more to say than most and they walked the walk rather than just talked the talk. Owen, as I recall died on the front line.

I think "Dulce est" is one of the most graphic pieces on the inhumanity of life on the front line.

[scroff]

Thank you for those, ilw. I have mixed feelings of anger and sorrow when I read them. I don't know how people will feel about this post, as I continue with the poetry, but this is a poem from a man I met during one of the VfP rallys in New York City... it seems to capture the feeling of being on the "victorious" side of over whelming fire power

Free Fire Zone

Trembling and sobbing
you crawl out of your hole
brown grime encrusted on your face,
brittle white hair touched gently by wind.


And begging you fall down on your knees
and raise your wizened hands in supplication
to what stands mute in us, and cold to all your needs -
which kicks and prods you back upon your feet.

You stumble, dazed, between the holes
into the empty field beyond
and fall, and turn, and fall and cry again at us...
And then as flame comes blazing to engulf you from the sky
I wonder why
you ever bothered
ever being born.

--Serigo
Cpl, rifleman, 2nd (marine) Combined Action Gp 67-68
Two Purple Hearts

[scroff]

Sassoon and Owen make for grim reading - but they have more to say than most and they walked the walk rather than just talked the talk. Owen, as I recall died on the front line.

I think "Dulce est" is one of the most graphic pieces on the inhumanity of life on the front line.

for the curious... Dulce et Decorum est

thanks for the cue, Biggles