Quote of the day: A soldier’s deepest wish
From Six Weeks, the book about British junior officers in World War I that I’ve mentioned before, here is a stanza from a poem by Sub-Lt. A.P. Herbert, who fought at Gallipoli, and later saw his battalion destroyed at the Somme: We only want to take our wounds away To some shy village where the ...
From Six Weeks, the book about British junior officers in World War I that I've mentioned before, here is a stanza from a poem by Sub-Lt. A.P. Herbert, who fought at Gallipoli, and later saw his battalion destroyed at the Somme:
From Six Weeks, the book about British junior officers in World War I that I’ve mentioned before, here is a stanza from a poem by Sub-Lt. A.P. Herbert, who fought at Gallipoli, and later saw his battalion destroyed at the Somme:
We only want to take our wounds away
To some shy village where the tumult ends,
And drowsing in the sunshine many a day,
Forget our aches, forget that we had friends.
I really like those lines. The emotion they convey is more complex than it may first appear, especially the last five words.
Thomas E. Ricks is a former contributing editor to Foreign Policy. Twitter: @tomricks1
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