"It's a Long Way to Tipperary"

the camera was still
a novelty in 1914
so that's why everyone
mugs and grins
in jerky motion pictures
but sits upright, stiff,
and a little glassy-eyed
in formal studio portraits
against peculiar, no doubt
conventional settings;

we look at their faces
today, and we think,
my god, these people
look so innocent:
upright solemn young men
in rough, uncomfortable
factory-made uniforms,
unaware of their historical
fate, sacrificial lambs
before the slaughter.

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Armistice Day marks the end of the First World War at 11 am on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. The Brits, Canadians, Australians - even the Irish - have a deeper emotional connection with this war than our American cousins. I would like to make a quiet appeal for memory on behalf of all those young guys who were marched off to a dreadful and unimaginably horrible situation in the late summer of 1914, all in the name of patriotism, and who died in their hundreds of thousands. This was never an important war in US history but it has left an indelible scar on Europe. The First World War was the cause of the Second World War -- in fact, it was the same damn war with a 20-year half-time break while the Germans got geared up to go again.

One is not encouraged to write commentaries like this, particularly when they are longer than the poem.

So I will shut up. But for those who are interested, I have re-tooled an article I wrote about a visit to the battlefields of the Somme in the summer of 2000.

Are we still upset about this war and what it did to Europe? Believe it. Without this idiotic mass slaughter the whole history of the world could have been very different: no Soviet Union, no Hitler, no Second World War, no Cold War ... and probably no Dubya Bush