Doctor o'Connor and the Laughter of War

I

Gelding

(Saint Gregory's salt

and forgive my ruptured lung!

-and forgive Ginusa, too, who squats

on a man's head and breaks his shoulders till he coughs)

gelding the fleur-de-lys again, eh Henri?

So: one of you was at Bagdad, and this one

wound up at Carcassonne with salad

on his unlovable mutilation. And Curtis,

we've all heard how he played second kazoo

when everybody's grandpa and the Marshal's

drum and bugle band

usurped a reputation at Verdun.

Anyone here

from the Bashi-bazouks? Or were all of you

Janissaries. Not one who stood up

with Cassiodorus, when he pondered the odds?

Bagdad |

Chemin-des-Dames

Bapaume

Arras

-Who'll know your names in fifty years?

And Aunt Nancy! the tank corps. Well, Gaston,

I found men in tanks were slow, and unreliable,

and made a load of noise compared with gas.

My one accomplishment?

The most tedious achievement of our time:

I, too, have outlived so many decent men.

When I heard one crying

in the woods I said to myself, "This one

will not come out of it."

The boys went West

and are athletic in the grave.

Though perhaps even now beyond the Meuse

the remains of Nietzsche's beast, blondness

and emptiness, is down on its knees

in an alley, praying to a swagger stick.

If their seed is so good

why don't they make a strudel of it?

u

Oh I remember that war.

Potting across the trenches, raiding the saps,

cutting through coils of wire and going

over the top of a flattened position.

We'd reconnoiter a field, peg out a line

complete with switches, forwards, leaching zones,

then set up the big guns in a nest,

keep our balls skinned, and be prepared

to stay in place for weeks.

And there was plenty of laughter

down in the gluey pits.

A Junker might buzz

over Paris, Count Zeppelin lower a few bombs,

Long Bertha unexpectedly

let go at ornamental water

in a park brimming with jonquils and children,

but the metronome at HQ

kept its slow thrombosis while men

like Moltke Ludendorf and Foch-blindmen

all, buff in maprooms prickling

with thumb-sized colored flags.

Heroes?

Let me tell you about heroes!

The hot dusty wait,

the wait in a cold drizzle, the bone-splitting

windy January wait for the mail truck

and no letter and no love coming

- You know that man

was defrocked for an inappropriate laughter.

It's a dissonant noise that swells

a jovial priest.

Sweet Jesus, we killed three years

and never moved a good day's walk with a gimpy knee.

Weeks-was it only weeks?-whole bodies of us

hunkered down by the gas blanket and I...

(excuse my spastic wrist) believe I've

jostled your glass.

Well in April,

when I was a wet nurse dressed in clay,

they shunted us down to a village of amputees

where there were 37 legs

to be put to bed with a mattock.

We were trading tales to make the shovels lighter

when a boy from Signals told us Hackman

(our Old Man) had the squabs that wouldn't fly

brought to him in their lime-besmattered jails.

Seems he jollied up and got sloshed as Sim's Circus

watching tarts in shifts

twist off their heads.

But on the only day I saw him, he would spit blood.

Plenty of laughter, laughter

out of every useable orifice. And we sang.

We sang "Sister Susie" and "Good-bye Dolly Grey,"

we sang at the foxtrot ball, we did

"Everybody's Doing It" and "Hesitation Waltz"

-we sang like a chorus of bullfrogs

over beyond the thistles

and like soloing canaries

back from the galleries alive.

m

And it's true:

I found in war the only lyric moment

in my life. I found myself for once

greater than the loneliness, huger than my death,

which had become the flushing of a cell

within the bloody of The Sta...

Preserve me,

my Abyssinian medallion

and the one-eyed creature in my pocket,

but isn't this a fetching military number!

All stitched up in (what do you call the woof?)

khaki gabardine!

All lanyards and chevrons:

wasp waist, two-piece blouse,

musketeer cuffs

-You know it takes four hands

to give a good massage: the masseuse

and her pet monkey.

Now now-

no violence corporal. "A minute's piece

is always worth the having"

(and I've seen cheek on a stud before.)

Chérie,

you'll have the Saint Cyr maidens

squatting on a rosebush, when you pass mustard

in those tea-party ribbons.

Oh, I can read:

No Irish Need Apply!

)

My friends, I wept

like a milkmaid behind the wire, trembled

at the cough of an exhaust, the flare

of a match. But in that convulsion,

the noise of history manufactured

regardless of expense, I was ecstatic

to be lost among the rest. I never fought

for myself (indeed, I never fought at all),

but always for the inevitable

dead gassed and blinded-for the beautiful

Alsatian eyes in the recruiting posters.

Everything was part of me, one flank my arm

another my left leg, my eyes crawling

somewhere up ahead, my fingers digging in,

my tongue commanding "On Brave Boys! On!"

even as my bowels bleat retreat.

It was my mother's love made me so brave,

some memory of a swim in amniotic fluid,

and I dissolved. I was one with toughs

pouring gas into Fords and Packards,

with the farm boys swinging at evening

on a pasture gate, and the slickered lads

warping the trawler into the dock

with its sweet thick cargo of fish.

IV

Petulant Mary! Can I remember them! A few

survivors of the first hundred thousand,

the BEF, the Old Contemptibles,

and that unfortunate class of '16, brave

boys and dead bodies, water-corpses,

grown men floating, nephews and cousins

sitting stark-eyed upright

-It was enough to make a necrophiliac weep.

Yes, of course, the brave weep too.

And Favres, who wept before Bismarck,

though there's not a patriot in the room

could tell me the substance of his tears.

-Nicolas, who made people laugh, Nicolas Chauvin

was an unknown soldier.

v

Well there was one, by name, one

in our outfit, a Breton child so young

I could not see me in his face.

The whites of his eyes were a milkquartz

set with two hard stones,

and a dying star in each. When he stared

you could see the torn skin of Mount Hope

and the first curdle of veins

at the corners of a grand idea. He had

the eyes of a frightened angel, malicious eyes

too, like a sub-demon that's not yet won its spurs

and feels sometimes, with longing,

along those two elliptical scars,

the atrophying wings.

I used to wonder if

he'd held his brows while something

tied the knot, or if the first division in the womb

had been his eyes, so that the body

had been obliged to grow around them.

And God was sending us all the rain He had,

enough to make the duckboards wobble

and the smell of chloride rise up off the lime.

Somebody had to crawl out to him,

or to their own murky death among the craters,

and so I put my club foot in it and soon

I was chin and belly plowing

behind a tough old sweat named Hendriks.

We found Marius, hanging on the wire,

tin hat dumped in his head like a basin

and rain splotching the corkblack of his face.

When Caesar went forth at night

he was preceded by two elephants

bearing torches, but we had only a lamp

-that's right,

out on the macadam and lonelier than Death!

Then a whizz-bang quivered

and sank, and in that guttering phosphorescence

I saw that he was bleeding from his mouth, or from

the clotted gash where his smile

last accosted me. And I saw he was crying

in long red tears.

He never felt

the scrap of paper I folded into his pocket,

signed and dated and saying with some truth

"I saved your life under heavy fire."

Oh yes,

we got him back. We got him back all right,

but Marius had lost, you see he'd been denied

a necessary faculty for trench warfare

when all his two fine eyes exploded.