The surveying mistake…maybe it was
the extra ration of rum, or a Lake Champlain-sized
mosquito lighting on the theodolite…meant that
they started out building it on the enemy’s
side of things. An error not grasped for months.
By then the ramparts had begun their rising
from the fertile Canadian soil. Some luckless one
with exposed defenses of his own had to visit
humorless officials in Monroe’s Washington
and break the news.
They left it in situ, bleak, a fossil of botched industry.
For years the locals mused on the scene, made off
with the stones, or both. What the builders didn’t grasp
is that they’d never again know such success.
When one’s contribution to the art of war
is so much more the former than the latter.
