Harry Wilmans - EDGAR LEE MASTERS (1868-1950)

I WAS just turned twenty-one,
And Henry Phipps, the Sunday-school superintendent,
Made a speech in Bindle’s Opera House.
“The honor of the flag must be upheld,” he said,
“Whether it be assailed by a barbarous tribe of Tagalogs	5
Or the greatest power in Europe.”
And we cheered and cheered the speech and the flag he waved
As he spoke.
And I went to the war in spite of my father,
And followed the flag till I saw it raised	10
By our camp in a rice field near Manila,
And all of us cheered and cheered it.
But there were flies and poisonous things;
And there was the deadly water,
And the cruel heat,	15
And the sickening, putrid food;
And the smell of the trench just back of the tents
Where the soldiers went to empty themselves;
And there were the whores who followed us, full of syphilis;
And beastly acts between ourselves or alone,	20
With bullying, hatred, degradation among us,
And days of loathing and nights of fear
To the hour of the charge through the steaming swamp,
Following the flag,
Till I fell with a scream, shot through the guts.	25
Now there’s a flag over me in Spoon River!
A flag! A flag!

                            Poem Number 194 in     SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY    1916

                              http://www.bartleby.com/84/194.html

In Masters’s collection of post-mortem autobiographical “epitaphs,” 244 former citizens of the fictional Spoon River, Illinois tell us the truth about their lives—with the honesty no fear of consequences enables.