Mademoiselle from Armentières
you gotta have wars
suppose World War One was the best.
really, you know, both sides were much more enthusiastic,
they really had something to fight for,
they really thought they had something to fight for,
was bloody and wrong but it was Romantic,
those dirty Germans with babies stuck on the ends of their
bayonets, and so forth, and
there were lots of patriotic songs, and the women loved both the soldiers
and their money.
the Mexican war and those other wars hardly ever happened.
and the Civil War, that was just a movie.
the wars come too fast now
even the pro-war boys grow weary,
World War Two did them in,
and then Korea, that Korea,
that was dirty, nobody won
except the black marketeers,
and BAM!—then came Vietnam,
suppose the historians will have a name and a meaning for it,
but the young wised up first
and now the old are getting wise,
almost everybody’s anti-war,
no use having a war you can’t win,
right or wrong.
hell, I remember when I was a kid it
was 10 or 15 years after World War One was over,
we built model planes of Spads and Fokkers,
we bought Flying Aces magazine at the newsstand
we knew about Baron Manfred von Richthofen
and Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker
and we fought in dream trenches with our dream rifles
and had dream
bayonet fights with the dirty
Hun...
and those movies, full of drama and excitement,
about good old World War One, where
we almost got the Kaiser, we almost kidnapped him
once,
and in the end
we finished off all those spike-helmeted bastards
forever.
the young kids now, they don’t build model warplanes
nor do they dream fight in dream rice paddies,
they know it’s all useless, ordinary,
just a job like
sweeping the streets or picking up the garbage,
they’d rather go watch a Western or hang out at the
mall or go to the zoo or a football game, they’re
already thinking of college and automobiles and wives
and homes and barbecues, they’re already trapped
in another kind of dream, another kind of war,
and I guess it won’t kill them as fast, at least not
physically.
was wrong but World War One was fun for us
gave us Jean Harlow and James Cagney
and “Mademoi selle from Armentières, Parley-Voo?”
gave us
long aft ernoons and evenings of play
we didn’t realize that many of us were soon to die in
another war)
yes, they fooled us nicely but we were young and loved it—
the lies of our elders—
and see how it has changed—
they can’t bullshit
even a kid anymore,
not about all that.
Other works by Charles Bukowski...
