At the Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, May 2010
“to children ardent for some desperate glory…”
- Owen
The boys rushed in, a coach load of twenty-odd German teens,
But they might have been American or British or French, even Japanese.
Not remembering Verdun, the Canal, Shiloh, Waterloo, the Somme.
Boys! Excited, giddy at an old machine gun and trench mortar.
Goofing around with the gas mask exhibit. Playing soldier.
Waiting to go over the top. Fingering a bayonet, a Mills bomb,
An empty chlorine cylinder dubbed “the Accessory” by the Royal Engineers.
One sat behind a Krump MG08 and did air-guitar
Actions with the .303 weapon across a pasture
At a line of khaki moving along the horizon,
Crumpling up each young Tommy in his turn.
How like the innocents their great-grandfathers were,
Triumph and victory only a frenzied advance away
Through mud and wire, gas and fire.
Then the tattering-tat-tat of a British Vickers
Heard above the whine of a French 75
And down they all fell to become part of
This very spot, this muddy hell.
© James A. Zarzana. All rights reserved.
- Owen
The boys rushed in, a coach load of twenty-odd German teens,
But they might have been American or British or French, even Japanese.
Not remembering Verdun, the Canal, Shiloh, Waterloo, the Somme.
Boys! Excited, giddy at an old machine gun and trench mortar.
Goofing around with the gas mask exhibit. Playing soldier.
Waiting to go over the top. Fingering a bayonet, a Mills bomb,
An empty chlorine cylinder dubbed “the Accessory” by the Royal Engineers.
One sat behind a Krump MG08 and did air-guitar
Actions with the .303 weapon across a pasture
At a line of khaki moving along the horizon,
Crumpling up each young Tommy in his turn.
How like the innocents their great-grandfathers were,
Triumph and victory only a frenzied advance away
Through mud and wire, gas and fire.
Then the tattering-tat-tat of a British Vickers
Heard above the whine of a French 75
And down they all fell to become part of
This very spot, this muddy hell.
© James A. Zarzana. All rights reserved.
