A Tomb Guard Remembers

By Pasquale and Jen Gordon

A Tomb Guard Remembers, compiled by a former Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery, Pasquale Varallo, is a commemoration to the centennial of the Armistice of the Great War November 11, 2018 and the centennial of the laying of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The centennial of the reburial of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery is November 11, 2021.
This anthology is a collection of some of the many poems and songs, which those men who fought and wrote about that conflagration (and the women who waited for them to come home again) have left us as part of their legacy. Poets from the English-speaking world like Joyce Kilmer (Rendezvous With Death) for one. Wilfred Owen (Dulce et Decorum Est) and Edgar Guest (Things That Make A Great Soldier) are two more. It is through their eyes we see this war.
Included in this anthology will be works that glorify the soldiers who fought and died. It will also contain works that show the sad side and horror of war, the destruction of the lives who gave all. We see a changed attitude to war in some of our poets. Also, we hear from the mothers, wives, brothers and sisters. Humorous poems like The Guns of Verdun where the poet writes a conversation between the German guns and the French artillery.
This work is geared toward anyone with an interest in the Tomb of the Unknown Solider, war history, as well as poetry in general.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9798823007870

Book preview

2023 Pasquale with Jen Gordon. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/04/2023

ISBN: 979-8-8230-0786-3 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-0785-6 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-0787-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023908414

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A

TOMB GUARD

REMEMBERS

Commemorating the Centennials

of the Armistice of World War I

and

The Founding Of

The Tomb Unknown Soldier

Arlington National Cemetery

(c) 2015

PROLOGUE

WAR HAS BEEN a preoccupation of mankind since the very beginning of time. Perhaps it is because men have been waging war within their souls from the beginning. It is a simple thing: Good versus Evil. With freewill man has been given the ability to make choices. He may or may not choose to be good; in many cases he may choose the worst of courses. War has progressed to such a point that killing has become an exact science. The first weapon of war was the fist. Then the rock, the club and so on to launching axes, arrows, missiles and more. Now, man has made them so efficient that he can kill from an office chair behind a desk and go home to dinner after a hard day at the office. In the beginning of the twentieth century, it still hadn’t reached this proficiency. It wouldn’t until the latter part of the century to realize such weapons. But weapons in use then were terrible enough.

There is a book entitled The Last Romantic War, the author is a woman named Smith; it is about The Crimean War in the late 1840’s. And to be specific, The Charge Of The Light Brigade, how the gentry would pack picnics and get grandstand seats on high hills and watch the fun. Well the fun wasn’t funny; the aristocrats were horrified at the mayhem. They had no stomach for war after this.

However, the idea that war was romantic was put to bed forever at the start of the Civil War in the United Sates of America. More specifically, at the first Battle for Bull Run a few years after Crimea. This country had yet to learn the lesson of the Crimean debacle for at the beginning of the American Civil War the gentry from Washington got into their horse drawn buggies in holiday dress and mood to go watch the Union Soldiers put the rebels in their place. Well, they near broke each others necks getting the hell out of the way of retreating blue coats, their bleeding way, who were fleeing from Bull Run, that little run of water in Virginia near Washington, DC. It would be different the second time at Manassas, but there would be no grandstand ever again. That was the last romantic battle.

From then on, war was for warriors only.

And for the most part, it would be left to the men who fought and a selected few whose job it was to report on war. Trench warfare by the end of The Civil War would be in its infancy. This was the kind of war that would come to France and much of Europe in 1914.

There has always been a fascination in the hearts of men and women for war, to know what it is like, to know it if it can be known without being in it. It is something in us like why we are fascinated at seeing certain fierce creatures that would be too daunting for most of us to face, for instance a giant crocodile or a great white shark. And it is also because we memorialize the men who sacrificed to defend our land we try to commemorate wars in which these heroes sacrificed life and limb. So we come to the reason for this endeavor: The centennial of the Armistice of the Great War November 11, 2018 (the war to end all wars) and the centennial of the laying of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The centennial of the reburial of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National

Cemetery is November 11, 2021.

In this little book we will collect some of the many poems, which those men who fought and wrote about that conflagration (and the women who waited for them to come home again) have left us as part of their legacy. Poets like Joyce Kilmer (Rendezvous With Death) for one. Wilfred Owen (Dulce et Decorum Est) and Edgar Guest (Things That Make A Great Soldier) are two more. It is through their eyes we see this war.

Included in this anthology will be works that glorify the soldiers who fought and died. It will also contain works that show the sad side and horror of war, the destruction of the lives who gave all. We see a changed attitude to war in some of our poets. Also, we hear from the mothers, wives, brothers and sisters. Humorous poems like The Guns of Verdun where the poet writes a conversation between the German guns and the French artillery.

We take no part in the philosophical argument for or against war. We only take part in the commemoration of The Great War’s centennial. We leave the individual to his or her own philosophical bent.

In his introduction to The Oxford Book of War Poetry, Jon Stallworthy underlines the emotive power of poems about war: ‘Poetry,’ Wordsworth reminds us, ‘is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ and there can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war: hope and fear; exhilaration and humiliation; hatred – not only for the enemy, but also for generals, politicians, and war-profiteers; love – for fellow soldiers, for women and children left behind, for country (often) and cause (occasionally).

Oxford University English lecturer Dr. Stuart Lee says, The First World War was one of the seminal moments of the twentieth century in which literate soldiers, plunged into inhuman conditions, reacted to their surroundings in poems.

Roughly 10 million soldiers, of all the combatants combined, lost their lives in World War I, along with seven million civilians. To say nothing of the countless who were maimed and tormented for the rest of their lives. The horror of the war and its aftermath altered the world for decades (and led to an even more horrible war barely twenty years later) and poets responded to the brutalities, losses and the heroism in new ways.

Many collections of poems from and about the First World War have been drawn together over the past hundred years. With a little imagination it might be any war. These are the works of the war poets, war songs by composers such as Irving Berlin who was drafted and wrote the song, Oh, How I Hate To get Up In The Morning, as a protest about it. There are works by the women who stayed at home and worried about their sons and husbands. What we have tried to do is give the reader an idea of the time.

They are arranged according to the poet’s seniority, the eldest to the youngest. The youngest is a patriotic boy of nine who will never be ten. War is a hell that only demons and saints can really know.

- Pasquale Varallo

The proof of poetry is, in my mind, that it reduces to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy which is floating in all men’s minds, and so render it portable and useful, and ready to the hand no poem ever makes me respect its author which does not in some way convey a truth of philosophy

James Russell Lowell 1819-1891

CONTENTS

01: And Then There Was A Great Calm

02: Summer In England

03: In War Time

04: Better To Die

05: A Holiday

06: The Brave Highland Laddies

07: On The Italian Front, MCMXVI

08: The Kaiser’s Place In The Sun

09: Mothers

10: Sock It To ‘Em

11: Here Dead We Lie

12: Soldier From The Wars Returning

13: Glory

14: A Liberty Bond

15: The Cry Of Women

16: Of Gases

17: To France

18: Belgium

19: Any Woman To A Soldier

20: Moving On

21: The Question

22: My Boy Jack

23: War Girls

24: We Shall Keep The Faith

25: June, 1915

26: The Cenotaph

27: Keep The Home Fires Burning (song)

28: September

29: The Pacifist

30: I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier (song)

31: It’s Time For Every Boy To Be A Soldier (song)

32: Guns Of Verdun

33: In Flanders Fields

34: The Anxious Dead

35: A Ballad Of Footmen

36: A Soldier

37: For A War Memorial

38: In Memoriam A.H.

39: Lights Out

40: Reveille

41: Lament

42: Breakfast

43: Over There

44: Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag (song)

45: He Who Serves

46: From A Full Heart

47: Billy Boy (song)