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Rising from your ghost town and its undertow
I woke at two or three minutes to eleven this morning. I hadn't set an alarm. It wasn't the same universal time as the Last Post in Ypres. I lay awake a little while and then, not having slept in a day and a half, went back to sleep. I didn't dream of wars.
Of course the man who is supposed to be president of my country fumbled the most important part of his memorial duties, the recognition of the dead. What does he care about the dead? They can't do him favors. They died holding the line; he wouldn't go out in the rain.
I am off to look at old books with my mother. So much time passes. Memory is easiest of all things to lose—mislay, soften, falsify, overwrite—and it's all we've got to go on with.
They lay with little sleep one more night in bivouac and went again next day to that bewilderment of white-worked fosse and gallery, artful traverse, and well-planned shelter, that had been his Front System.
And in the afternoon rain, saw, for the first time, infantry go forward to assault.
No. 7 were disposed in high overlooking ground. So that John Ball & the rest could comfortably, and in cover, because of the run of their trench, observe, as cockaded men of privilege were used to do, who pointed with their batons where the low smoke went before the forming squadrons on a plain. They wondered for each long stretched line going so leisurely down the slope and up again, strained eyes to catch last glimpses where the creeping smoke-screen gathered each orderly deployment within itself. They wondered for the fate of each tenuous assumption—settled back to their immediate duties in the trench. As sea-board men, who watch some perilous outgoing dip to a shrouded speck; who come down from the white sea-wall, turn eyes from the white in-swell and get down to some job of work.
Some time during the night they were moved by a guide into their own assembly positions.
—David Jones, In Parenthesis (1937)
Of course the man who is supposed to be president of my country fumbled the most important part of his memorial duties, the recognition of the dead. What does he care about the dead? They can't do him favors. They died holding the line; he wouldn't go out in the rain.
I am off to look at old books with my mother. So much time passes. Memory is easiest of all things to lose—mislay, soften, falsify, overwrite—and it's all we've got to go on with.
They lay with little sleep one more night in bivouac and went again next day to that bewilderment of white-worked fosse and gallery, artful traverse, and well-planned shelter, that had been his Front System.
And in the afternoon rain, saw, for the first time, infantry go forward to assault.
No. 7 were disposed in high overlooking ground. So that John Ball & the rest could comfortably, and in cover, because of the run of their trench, observe, as cockaded men of privilege were used to do, who pointed with their batons where the low smoke went before the forming squadrons on a plain. They wondered for each long stretched line going so leisurely down the slope and up again, strained eyes to catch last glimpses where the creeping smoke-screen gathered each orderly deployment within itself. They wondered for the fate of each tenuous assumption—settled back to their immediate duties in the trench. As sea-board men, who watch some perilous outgoing dip to a shrouded speck; who come down from the white sea-wall, turn eyes from the white in-swell and get down to some job of work.
Some time during the night they were moved by a guide into their own assembly positions.
—David Jones, In Parenthesis (1937)
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Once again: so much for his rhetoric of respecting the troops. Only if he thinks they'll vote for him.
I hope someone else visited the dead of Belleau Wood.
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Nine
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I like the way you think.
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*hugs*
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I don't think so—it wasn't quite eleven o'clock and I don't ordinarily hear bells from any church where I live. But I'm glad they were ringing.
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This.
Nine
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*hugs*
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Yes, it gets lost so very quickly. *nods*
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I feel sometimes it's all I talk about, but it matters to me. It's so fragile and so important.