1936

1936

A poem by Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

(The last two of its four stanzas)

....And the guns rolled, and the tanks, but there was no sound,

Never the gasp and rustle of living men

Where the skeletons strung their wire on disputed ground........

I knew them, then.

"It is eighteen years," I cried. "You must come no more.

We know your names. We know that you are the dead.

Must you march forever from France and the last, blind war?"

"Fool! From the next!" they said.