Peace with Honor: Solitudine faciunt, pacem appellant. (the ghosts of war).

Peace with
Honor

Solitudine
faciunt,
pacem
appellant.

   I

   The outer provinces are never secure:
   our Legions hold the camps, their orders
   do not embrace the minds
   and hearts of barbarians. So, when the late-
   late news reported the outlandish
   screams in that distant temple,
   the great bronze Victory toppled,
   red stains in the sea, corpses
   stranded by the ebb tide--all of that,
   and only four hundred
   armed men at the garrison--why,
   of course it had to come, the massacre,
   the plundering.

   II

   It was the decade's scandal at home,
   the humiliation, the Eagles gone.
   Senators put on grim faces
   and gossiped over Bloody
   Marys--what laureled head would roll for this?
   Reports from the field
   were cabled not to the Emperor but
   to the Joint Chiefs, to filter
   through at last, edited
   and heavy with conclusions: the traitor,
   they revealed, was not in uniform,
   the treason was our own permissiveness;
   in sterner times our Fathers would not
   have suffered such dishonor.
   We nodded: yes, they knew,
   the Chiefs, what ancient virtue was.
   The twilight shudders of matrons
   seasoned our resolution. Somber, we took
   a fourth martini, wandered to the couches,
   the tables rich with peacocks' tongues,
   and nodded,
   nodded, waiting.

   III

   They sent our toughest
   veterans, the Ninth Legion, the Fourteenth,
   the Hundred-and-First, their orders unambiguous:
   teach the barbarians respect.
   Our marshals chose the spot: a steep defile
   covering the rear, our regular troops drawn close,
   light-armed auxiliaries at their flanks,
   cavalry massed on the wings.
   The enemy seethed everywhere, like a field
   of wind-blown grasses.
   There were the usual
   harangues, the native leaders boasting
   their vast numbers, screaming
   freedom or death;
   our generals, with that subtle sneer
   they learn at the Academy,
   pointing only to the Eagles on their tall shafts-
   and every man remembered
   the shame of Eagles fallen, comrades' bones
   unburied: there was that curious thing,
   men in bronze and steel, weeping.
   And then the charge, the clash of arms,
   cavalry with lances fixed, the glorious
   victory: a hundred thousand tons of TNT
   vaporized their villages, their forests were
   defoliated, farmland poisoned forever,
   the ditches full of screaming children,
   target-practice for our infantry.
   The land, once green and graceful,
   running with pleasant streams in the rich brown earth,
   was charred and gutted--not even a bird
   would sing there again.

   IV

   A glorious victory, of course,
   but in a larger sense, a mandatory act
   of justice: the general peace
   was kept, the larger order held; peasants
   for a thousand leagues around
   are working their mules again.
   Our prisoners and Eagles all returned,
   we dine at the rich tables,
   thinking of the Sunday games,
   thinking of anything but rebellion--thinking
   the honor of Empire
   is saved.

Philip Appleman received the Humanist Arts Award from the American Humanist Association in 1994. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1944 to 1945 and in the U.S. Merchant Marine Corps in 1946 and from 1948 to 1949. He is the author of three novels, including In the Twelfth Year of the War; a half-dozen nonfiction books, including the new third edition of the Norton Critical Edition, Darwin; and seven books of poetry, including New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996, from which the above poems are reprinted. This article is adapted from War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities.