War
By John Jaques
A lady, talking with the Duke of
Wellington, once proudly said –
“A victory is a glorious thing, sir,”
But he sadly shook his head.
In answering her the Duke’s remark was
Like this, which I here repeat –
“Than victory there is but one thing worse.
“That one thing, ma’m, is defeat.”
War is debt and bonds and taxes,
Principal and interest, too.
Interest makes debts more than double,
Ere is paid all that is due.
War produces untold suffering,
Cripples, widows, orphans makes,
Thousands sends to graves untimely –
Every thing it wants it takes.
War is waste and reckless ruin.
Equity and morals go.
Hatred, famine, plague – all evils
In war’s path relentless flow.
“War is hell.” So Sherman called it,
Hell upon the earth indeed.
War is all crimes concentrated,
War’s their harvest and their seed.
War is rapine. That’s sufficient
To disgust an honest man.
War is murder. That should put it
Under universal ban.
Hail! That grand Millennial era,
When dread war’s alarms are o’er –
Swords and spears and gun abolished,
Nations shall learn war no more.
(1898)
Bro. Jacques should have sent this to the New York Journal to see if Mr. Hearst would publish it. (Not likely, I’m afraid, especially not in 1898.)
Truth strikes again.
I suspect this is the same Bro Jacques that wrote the poem calling truth “the fairest gem that the riches of worlds can produce.”
If so, he’s also famous for surviving (and documenting) the Martin Handcart company’s 1856 trek, and died two years after this poem was published, sparing himself the horror of the “waste and reckless ruin” of the First World War.
You have the right man, TOClark.
Yet again I am slow to catch up on your posts, but reading this now was well timed, having recently returned from a visit to a WWI memorial display at a museum 200km from home. On one of the walls was printed a portion of a letter written by poet (and soldier) Wilfred Owen to his mother:
“I suppose I can endure cold, and fatigue, and the face to face death, as well as another; but extra for me there is the universal pervasion of Ugliness. Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language, even from one’s own mouth (for all are devil ridden). Everything is unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodes sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth, In poetry we call them most glorious, But to sit with them all day, all night … and a week later to come back and find them still sitting there in motionless groups THAT is what saps the ‘soldierly spirit.’
Glorious dead, and glorious victory; both, glorious misnomers.
When I was stationed in northern Italy on a temporary military assignment, I took my bicycle with so I could do a lot of bicycling. Every village, no matter how small, had a war memorial. Those that impressed me the most were not the statues of the big, strong warriors waving banners. The ones that pulled at my heart were the statues of a woman kneeling, a prone man’s head in her lap, as she wept.