My great-uncle Karl definitely was no war hero

If not for his honorable father he would, in fact,

have deserted his Emperor and crossed the then-border

with a bunch of bad characters

But my great-grandfather said

my son is no traitor to the fatherland

so off Karl went to the Italian front

where he failed to receive one single

citation for bravery, making debts instead

His older brother, my great-uncle Sigmund

(apparently a believer in positive reinforcement)

brought him a very fancy trench coat, 

together with a phosphorescent watch

on which to measure time left

Thus attired my great-uncle Karl

sat down in the trenches to read a trashy book

every now and then interrupting his lecture

to look his phosphorescent watch in the face

perhaps trying to catch a glimpse of himself

an instant before

without a thought to the Austro-Hungarian Empire

he most ingloriously died

hit by a World War One shell

at the age of nineteen.