As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poets’ Corner  
 

In say 1912 in the time of the supposedly big deal Basle Socialist Conference which got reflected in more circles than just workingmen, small shopkeepers and small farmers, or 1913 for that matter when the big deal European powers were waging "proxy" war, making ominous moves, but most importantly working three shifts in the munitions plants, oh hell, even in the beginning of 1914 before the war clouds got a full head of steam that summer they all profusely professed their undying devotion to peace, to wage no war for any reason. Reasons: artists who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society, freaked out at what humankind had produced, was producing to place everybody in an inescapable box and hence their cubic fascinations from which to run, put the pieces to paint; sculptors who put twisted pieces of scrape metal juxtaposed to each other  to get that same effect, an effect which would be replicated on all those foreboding trenched fronts; writers, not all of them socialists either, some were conservatives that saw empire, their particular empire, in grave danger once the blood started flowing  who saw the v   of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy; writers of not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and for the sweet nothing maidens to spent their waking hours strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they with all their creative brethren would go to the hells, literary Dante's rings, before touching the hair of another human, that come the war drums they all would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist, world and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels.

And then the war drums intensified and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, they who could not resist the call, could not resist those maidens now busy all day strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets for their soldier boys, those poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went sheepishly to the trenches with the rest of the flower of European youth to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for ….            

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

It has recently been suggested that over 2000 individuals were writing poetry during the Great War – and a recent anthology contains the works of some 80 individuals who served on the Western Front and whose work was published in anthologies of the day. 
Some of the War poems have inevitably become more well-known than others.  “In Flanders Fields” written in 1915 by a Canadian John McCrae an Army doctor, who had seen action in South Africa prior to the First World War, would be the inspiration for the symbolic Poppy that is worn in remembrance every November and makes up the wreaths laid at war memorials across the land on Remembrance Sunday.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

 

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

Another of the most enduring and powerful poems of the First World War is Wilfred Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est” in which Owen describes in graphic detail the death of a soldier overcome by poison gas.  The title is taken from an ode by the Roman lyric poet Horace that reads in full “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”: “How sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country”.

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori

The hurt and anger of many comes through “A Dead Statesman” by Rudyard Kipling who lost his son in the Battle of Loos in 1915:
 

 I could not dig: I dared not rob:

Therefore I lied to please the mob.

Now all my lies are proved untrue

And I must face the men I slew.

What tale shall serve me here among

Mine angry and defrauded young?

The American Alan Seeger had joined the French Foreign Legion in 1914 and was killed in action two years later at Belloy-en-Santerre.  His poem “I have a rendezvous with death” was a favourite of President John F. Kennedy

 I have a rendezvous with Death

 At some disputed barricade,

 When Spring comes back with rustling shade

 And apple-blossoms fill the air—

 I have a rendezvous with Death

 When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

 During the Second World War, another generation of war poets (Alun Lewis, Keith Douglas and others) emerged to take their places alongside those who had fought in an earlier war.  Some things had changed and some had not; in To a Conscript of 1940, Herbert Read’s soldier sends a message to the soldiers of another war. In a different vein, Henry Reed’s wry sense of humour and keen observation in “Naming of Parts” captures perfectly the essence of the early weapon training lessons given to all new recruits and the unfamiliarity of it all for a mass citizen army. 

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,

We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,

We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,

To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica

Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,

And to-day we have naming of parts.