#939: Ambulance Unit

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For E.H.K.’s epitaph[1]

‘Say goodbye to all 
this bluddled nonsense on earth: 
simple rot inside 
a coffin’s a better life. 
I’m now more trouble than I’m 

worth to myself and 
to others. So I shall choose 
myself a quiet 
and, I hope, a dignified 
exit to another entrance.’ 

He did, without fuss. 
He had maintained for nearly 
sixty-three years a 
manly and dutiful stance 
about his long Somme nightmare: 

tumbled guts, split brains, 
staring corpses, anxious eyes 
still living, screams, gas—
in the shadows of these his

family life, his daily 
care for detailed work, 
his patient teaching of all 
practical matters, 
his determination not 
to ask why, but to endure . . . 

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[1] Patricia King’s father served in a Quaker-sponsored ambulance corps during World War I. He died at the King home in Orem, Utah, in May 1984.