The captain of the Seventh Company
of Lancers was the bastard son (they said)
of some Hungarian princess, but he'd risen
through the ranks on his own merit, not connections.
Chivalry was his calling, he believed.
And in a century before the Mauser
he might've made a perfect, gentle knight --
one who recited Latin poetry
and pinned his lady's favor to his breast
before he rode out to a tournament.
Perhaps he'd even take the Holy Land.
But he, as luck would have it, had been born
in eighteen eighty-nine, and so his lot
was realism, not Arthurian romance
(if such a thing had ever really been).
His last impassioned cry of "No surrender!"
fell on deaf, mangled ears in no man's land,
and seconds later he himself became
a bloodied hunk of meat in the Ardennes.
He left behind no widow. And his name
was one of millions you don't remember.