Old Timers
An Illustrated Poem from the Past
My husband has said to me that if he ever wound up back in time, he’d have been a man-at-arms in the lord’s employ. He’s referring to both that no man is special in particular except as an accident of birth, and that soldiers since time immemorial have a certain something that transcends time and place. The brotherhood of war, born of blood after the sweat of training and dull hours of waiting for the momentary terrors of battle, stretches through all time into the now.
Old Timers
I am an ancient reluctant conscript.
On the soup wagons of Xerxes I was a cleaner of pans.
On the march of Miltiades’ phalanx I had a haft and head;
I had a bristling gleaming spear-handle.
Red-headed Caesar picked me for a teamster.
He said, “Go to work, you Tuscan Bastard!
Rome calls for a man who can drive horses.”
The units of conquest led by Charles the Twelfth,
The whirling whimsical Napoleonic columns:
They saw me one of the horseshoers.
I trimmed the feet of a white horse Bonaparte swept the night stars with.
Lincoln said, “Get into the game; your nation takes you.”
And I drove a wagon and team, and I had my arm shot off
A Spottsylvania Court House.
I am an ancient reluctant conscript.
—Carl Sandburg
General Patton felt that too. One of the reasons I give more credit to his claims of past lives is that he didn't JUST remember being nobility.
So as through a glass, and darkly
The age long strife I see
Where I fought in many guises,
Many names, but always me.
And I see not in my blindness
What the objects were I wrought,
But as God rules o’er our bickerings
It was through His will I fought.
So forever in the future,
Shall I battle as of yore,
Dying to be born a fighter,
But to die again, once more.
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/Poetry-Reader-2023/Through-a-Glass-Darkly/
Yep what your husband says but my druthers would be bard.
Lyre, a key to cottages and castles. A pass defying boarders. A seat at many tables. In the thick of happenings. I remember reading Celts, the bards, in the ranks, not on the sidelines, in the battles loudly iambic pentametering heroes and past glories uplifting, inspiring the leaders and the grunts until the clang and bang of battle became so grand it drowned out their voices...
Then the bagpipes took over.