They could not carry much, as soldiers.

There was no past in their forgetting,

No self in the mass: the braver being,

The body that could never be wounded,

The life that never would end, no matter

Who died, the being that was an abstraction,

A giant’s heart in the veins, all courage.

But to strip off the complacent trifles,

To expel the ever-present seductions,

To reject the script for its lack-tragic,

To confront with plainest eye the changes,

That was to look on what war magnified.

It was increased, enlarged, made simple,

Made single, made one. This was not denial.

Each man himself became a giant,

Tipped out with largeness, bearing the heavy

And the high, receiving out of others,

As from an inhuman elevation

And origin, an inhuman person,

A mask, a spirit, an accoutrement.

For soldiers, the new moon stretches twenty feet.