"Rendezvous with Death" -- No Poets on the Battlefield?!?

Rating: 10/10 (9 February 1999)

To those who believe and claim that soldiers do not think in poetry, EVER, or that Saving Private Ryan is "more realistic" than Thin Red Line, BECAUSE its characters do not ponder the age-old conflicts of beauty and evil, nor pity their enemy--
I could express disbelief that none of you seem to have heard of Wilfred Owen, or Alan Seeger, or E.A. MacKintosh, or read "In Flanders' Fields" or "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" or "The Naming of Parts,"
or I could expound abstractly for hours and pages on the intimate and historical connections between risking death and seeking meaning in life...
...or I could, very simply, give you the words of a soldier who really DID invade Normandy and eventually paid the same price as Miller & company--
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VERGISSMEINICHT ["Forget me not"]
Three weeks gone and the combatants gone, / returning over the nightmare ground / we found the place again, and found / the soldiers sprawling in the sun.
The frowning barrel of his gun / overshadowing. As we came on that day, / he hit my tank with one / like the entry of a demon.
Look. Here in the gunpit spoil / the dishonored picture of his girl / who has put: 'Steffi. Vergissmeinicht' / in a copybook gothic script.
We see him almost with content abased, / and seeming to have paid / and mocked at by his own equipment / that's hard and good when he's decayed.
But she would weep to see today / how on his skin the swart flies move; / the dust upon the paper eye / and the burst stomach like a cave.
For here the lover and killer are mingled / who had one body and one heart. / And death who had the soldier singled / has done the lover mortal hurt.
--Keith Douglas (1920 - 1944)
----------------------------- Remember: Socrates too was a poet as well as a philosopher, whose "simple questions" still worry us today -- and he too took up the javelin in defense of his hometown, yet never ceased to wonder -- nor did he ever go to art school or college!