The Setting of the Sun: Part Two

Tommy Atkins was a good boy grew to be a good man, good soldier, packed up his troubles in an old kit bag and smiled as his entrails blew out with aplomb; he died as the black rain struck his slowly glazing eyes good son, good husband, good father left only good for fertilizing the Somme. Damned carnage-strewn carnival of barbed wire bisected mustard gas days; how “great” was the great war, how “great” was the harm when old strategists cast generations of youth into the stalemate jaws of trench warfare death and all those young hopefuls who bought the dream unwittingly bought the farm. Two decades down the smouldering road, up rolls Euro Death Circus rolling out Four Horsemen and a Fascist regime insane; now technology enhanced the butchery with planes and tanks, boats and submarines and all the young hopefuls bought the farm again. Proudly she revels in her past glory, wallowing and exalting, sucking rotten cold comfort from the memorial corpse of a golden fleece; learning nothing; we’ll meet again, no doubt, over the white cliffs of Dover beneath Spitfire engine trails, perhaps; for she may have won the war, yet she has surely lost the peace. A land once fit for heroes, warrior kings and demigods, now freezes crippled and immobile when the race into the future has begun; in a pox of politically correct Fascism on one hand and the real thing on the other, where is the hand of reason to stop the fall of night, stop the setting of the sun...?