{
 "id": "edgar-lee-masters/harry-wilmans",
 "title": "Harry Wilmans",
 "ordinal": null,
 "subtitle": null,
 "poet": "Edgar Lee Masters",
 "poet_slug": "edgar-lee-masters",
 "language": "en",
 "book": "Spoon River Anthology",
 "book_slug": "spoon-river-anthology",
 "book_kind": "volume",
 "sequence": 194,
 "container": null,
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1916,
  "venue": "Spoon River Anthology (1916)",
  "note": "First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established.",
  "uncertain": false,
  "sources": [
   "https://archive.org/details/spoonriveranthol021mast"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/edgar-lee-masters_spoon-river-anthology",
  "file": "spoon-river-anthology.xhtml",
  "upstream": [
   "https://web.archive.org/web/20080723131115/http://spoonriveranthology.net/spoon/river/originalOrder/",
   "https://archive.org/details/spoonriveranthol021mast"
  ],
  "rights": "public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931)"
 },
 "verification": {
  "level": "structural-only",
  "last_checked": "2026-08-20"
 },
 "stats": {
  "n_lines": 27,
  "n_stanzas": 1,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 60,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "I was just turned twenty-one,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And Henry Phipps, the Sunday school superintendent,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Made a speech in Bindle’s Opera House.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "“The honor of the flag must be upheld,” he said,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "“Whether it be assailed by a barbarous tribe of Tagalogs",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Or the greatest power in Europe.”",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And we cheered and cheered the speech and the flag he waved",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "As he spoke.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And I went to the war in spite of my father,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And followed the flag till I saw it raised",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "By our camp in a rice field near Manila,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And all of us cheered and cheered it.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "But there were flies and poisonous things;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And there was the deadly water,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And the cruel heat,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And the sickening, putrid food;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And the smell of the trench just back of the tents",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Where the soldiers went to empty themselves;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And there were the whores who followed us, full of syphilis;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And beastly acts between ourselves or alone,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "With bullying, hatred, degradation among us,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And days of loathing and nights of fear",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "To the hour of the charge through the steaming swamp,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Following the flag,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Till I fell with a scream, shot through the guts.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Now there’s a flag over me in Spoon River!",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "A flag! A flag!",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}