When a Poet is Called to War

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For Armistice When about this time a commemorative group is unveiled, a cenotaph opened for inspection- Observe the whippet bronze, the winged thew, the precise rhythm and think of the rehearsed dying it took to model these splendid attitudes. Only some of us having seen men die know they do not die in adagio movement, poised thus, heroically to register the finest emotions, the most typical national look for the grand close-up. Have you ever seen an original enshrined, unposed and without makeup, showing fear or resignation, bewilderment or shock, with the carrion crow and bluebottle for local color? The Unknown Soldier After a round or madness and a vague moment of pain, after forty winks of death, night came. After a shuddering interval of dark, when a great hand fell on the switch, shorted the circuit, cut all the wires, blew out the main fuse. And I was dredged out of the Rapido or the Rhine, the Neckar, the Moselle, recovered from the debris of Anzio or Aachen, Bastogne, St. Lo- face leveled, dogtags blown off. Charred past recognition in a gas-drenched tank, assembled in a shelter half on the mined reef of Iwo Jima. Went down. Failed to return. Was reported lost. Was entered missing in the morning report. A body in the Image of God was lying on the plain, the maggot and the bluebottle cast dice for it, and black bald birds swung lower and lower for

their cut. Angels came out of their caves and lay on the ledges sunning themselves, like old men or lepers. And in the last world, quarrelsome old men convened in doomed halls and bannered parliaments to vote for a vast splendid residential tomb. -Walter Benton written in Europe during WWII

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