Remembering Armageddon: Reflections on a Century of War

By R. Bedford Watkins

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1893385035
• ISBN13: 9781893385030
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Little Leaf Pr Inc
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.3" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Poignant, memorable, moving poetry.

Remembering Armageddon expresses through poetry the poignant story of America at war in the twentieth century with images that resonate with veterans and non-veterans alike. At the Somme: This field is rife with flowers now,/more fertile than when weary men/in muddy puttees paced the slimy duckboards/tracing endless trenches lined with wire/and laced with hate, the haunting stench of war./There gaunt men crouched in fear or dread,/or leaned a cautious head against/the sodden, sandbagged walls/to peer across the savaged land/where dead still lay,/or maybe to hear soft sobs of wounded,/still untended,/weeping in their lonely dying,/lying where they fell that summer day./Deep below this blossomed earth/their bleak bones lie in silent, mirthless shade./Forgotten now the hellish din/of screaming shell and spinning spray of shrapnel/in the deadly fire that fell from those indifferent skies./For with them lies no calm repose,/no grace to face the requisites of death./Gone is their principled conceit,/their firm defiance in defeat,/even their sweet life-giving breath./The mawkish, unconsoling choir/of praise for noble sacrifice,/each tiresome phrase of tribute or remorse/lies hushed upon their bloody bier,/now buried in the near oblivion of the dreary sod./Nor can a mem'ried smile be raised/except in grief/by those who loved them/and who gave them over to their glory/and to God.