Old Wounds. Canny Generals and clever Chiefs Of Staff Set out their boy soldiers on their bloody stage, So sure of victory, with Right and God on their side, All to please some President, Princeling, King or Kaiser. Then the winds of war blow away the chaff; Them old Field Marshalls live to a grand old age, To think back on service and sacrifice with due pride, Mind full of their many medals, yet still none the wiser.
'Life is an all-too fragile thing' Song for this post is 'Mama Bake A Pie (Daddy Kill A Chicken') by the Drive-By Truckers.
©Obbverse.
Obbverse 
I hadn’t heard that song. War is a rotten way to get glory.
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Agreed. I remember reading ‘Johnny Got His Gun’ by Dalton Trumbo and that had a real effect on my thinking, after a childhood of reading ‘Biggles’ stories and ‘Combat’ comics.
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The plot sounds very real. I’ll look into it.
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DBT is a good “newer” band. When I looked for the youtube of the song I learned it’s an original Tom T Hall song. The deep and disturbing aftermath of sending young men to die (if they’re lucky.)
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Yeah Lisa, the DBT version is the one I heard first, so I went with it. I had a real wake-up call seeing old movies like ‘Paths Of Glory’ and ‘All Quiet On The Western Front.’ My Dad was just young enough to see action- 18!- in the last days of WW2. Like a lot of ones who came out apparently unscathed he hated talking about it. Dad loved his blasted Westerns with Clint and Co, but didn’t enjoy anything like Big John Wayne in war glorifying gung-ho crap like ‘The Green Berets.’ I guess those shoot-’em-ups were too close to home.
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I understand about first version heard. My dad and his brother both served in WWII. Dad was in Italy and not sure where Uncle was but he never came home. Before my time. My dad was also a movie nut, never went over to color TV. We watched a lot of movies together.
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And there it is; the uncle who never came back, never made it back home.
Ditto what you say about watching movies together too. My Dad used to like to go to the movies – usually a Western!-with us two older boys. So, off to the local neighbourhood Vogue theatre we’d go, and we would actually cycle/bike there! Never see that now; now its heave the tribe into the SUV and go to your Megaplix 13 screen theatre, each with a maximum of 40 rinky-dink seats per theatre and pay a fortune for parking and popcorn!
And no, there’s been no drive-in theatres hereabouts for a long long time. Another casualty to the past.
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Nice you have those movie house memories with your dad and your brothers. So nice to bike there. My dad took us to the drive-in and had us hide in the wheel well of the old station wagon. Am happy to say we still have a drive-in theater here! 4 screens and the sound comes in on the radio, where each screen has its own station. Sad to say it’s been many moons since going to the drive-in theater.
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I fell between the cracks of wars, else I’d be gone and not forgotten.
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I feel blessed (lucky) to have not been born in my grandfathers times; Survive and fight in the first war, fight again or see your sons die in ‘The Great War- The Sequal.’
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It’s quite horrific. My mother described the knock on the door in the night when they were coming to say her brother was killed.
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Sympathies to your mum. And the whole world tilts on its axis.
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“The worst thing about war is that it seldom kills off the right people.” –Evan Esar
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Great quote, and too true. My wife’s grandfather came back from the war a surly changed man, turned to booze, wound up dying in a mental facility. Not an unknown outcome for a lot who ‘survived’ the war.
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