Quote of the day: A soldier's deepest wish

From Six Weeks, the
book about British junior officers in World War I that I've mentioned
before, here is a stanza from a poem by Sub-Lt. A.P. Herbert, who
fought at Gallipoli, and later saw his battalion destroyed at the Somme:

We only want to take
our wounds away

To some shy village
where the tumult ends,

And drowsing in the
sunshine many a day,

Forget our aches,
forget that we had friends.

I really like those lines. The emotion they convey is more
complex than it may first appear, especially the last five words.