Conscripts

Conscripts

“Fall in, that awkward squad,….

….Magic?  What’s magic got to do with you?

There’s no such thing?  Blood’s red and skies are blue.”

---

“Love chucked his lute away and dropped his crown.

Rhyme got sore heels and wanted to fall out.

….They looked

     at me

Reproachful; how I longed to set them free!”

“I gave them lectures on Defence, Attack;

    They fidgeted and shuffled, yawned and sighed,

And boggled at my questions.  Joy was slack…”

“Their training done, I shipped them all to France.

….And many a sickly, slender lord who’d filled

My soul long since with litanies of sin,

Went home, because they couldn’t stand the din.”

“But the kind, common ones that I despised,

….What stubborn-hearted virtues they disguised!

   They stood and played the hero to the end,

Won gold and silver medals bright with bars,

And marched resplendent home with crowns and stars.”…~Sigfried Sassoon, “Concscripts”

…You can’t even think of paradise when you’re in hell…well along the way of thorns. How many lives had he not seen spilled apparently to no purpose?...He breaks out, almost like a mad man, into imprecations, into vehement tirades, into sarcasms, ironies, the hellish laughters that arise from a heart that is not broken once for all but that is newly broken every day while the Monster that devours the lives of the young continues its ravages…

[Yet, I speak of a far more dangerous war.  War is war no matter where it wages.]

Let no one ever…from henceforth say a word in any way countenancing war.  It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there the individual may gain some hardship of soul by it.  For war is hell and those who institute it are criminals.  Were there anything to say for it, it should be said for its spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages.

   For myself this is the truth.  War doesn’t ennoble: it degrades. 

~Robert Nichols, ‘Introduction’, Sigfried Sassoon’s Counterattack