I think that the sheer stupidity of the pointless slaughter of the trenches in the First World War is what gets to me. Senior officers insisting that the ordinary foot-soldiers just march into a hail of bullets for no real result. The Regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker or the wonderfully moving book A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry - or, of course, the following bitter poem - can make me feel real anger on the behalf of those men.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
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.

Wilfred Owen

Dido, it is really encouraging that a modern teenager can get something from watching the British Legion ceremony.

My parents were married during WWII and my father, in the 8th Army, was sent to North Africa. He talked little about his experiences there, except to say when any of his comrades died and were buried, within minutes the local mountain Arabs would appear from 'no-where' dig up the bodies and pick the corpses clean of uniform; everything.
His tank was blown up but he claimed his life was saved because it was an American model the 'Grant-Sherman' with an escape hatch. After time in a field hospital and a hospital ship back through the Bay of Biscay and more treatment in England he was posted to North Germany at the end of hostilities and was finally de-mobbed in 1946.
I was born in early '45 so was too young to remember him not being at home although his army battle dress tunic hung in the hall gathering dust for years.
Going back a generation, my paternal grandfather served with the Yeomanry in WWI but because of a 'dicky heart' never went abroad and spent much of the time on Salisbury Plain.
The DH's grandfather was very badly wounded at Arras and my American grandfather, living in England with a young family worried endlessly that if the US joined the war he would be called-up to fight.
By WWII he was back in the US where he worked on the hush-hush Manhattan Project.
On the female front my Mother turned down by the WRENS (for having an alien Father(!) joined the WRACS, worked in Signals in the beautiful city of Oxford and received the message via her teleprinter that my father was being posted to the hospital there. Was this my starting point?
The DH's Aunts, both 'feisty' girls provided 'comforts for the troops' and one married a Canadian Royal Engineer . . . who's son and family visited for the first time at Easter.

A famous and much loved English poem from The Great War

The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever 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.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Rupert Brooke (1887 - 1915)

And the poem with perhaps the most memorable lines

Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen (21st September, 1914)

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is a music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncountered:
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables at home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end they remain.

As I wrote on another thread here, I have several very close family members, now deceased, who served proudly in WW II, mostly in the Pacific. One was torpedoed in the Caribbean and would never talk about his experience.

Here are two of my favorites:

Rendezvous

(Alan Seeger, 1888-1916)

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.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath--
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blisssful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

The Sleeper in the Valley

(Arthur Rimbaud, trans. from the French)

There's a green trough where a singing river
clings crazily to tattered grass that gleams
with silver, where from the proud mountain shivers
sunlight, and the valley foams with beams.

A soldier, young, with open mouth, bare head,
his neck is bathed in cool blue watercress,
under high clouds he sleeps, stretched on the grass,
and light rains on him, pale in his green bed.

He sleeps, his feet in irises. His smile
is like a sick child's, as he naps a while.
Nature, cradle him snugly; he is cold!

The fragrance wakens no quiver in his nostrils;
hand on his breast, he sleeps in sunlight, tranquil
In his right side there are two red holes.

When I was in HS, a fellow drama student did an oral interpretation of In Flanders Fields, one of my favorite war poem. He also read a poem entitled 'Return to Flanders' in which the dead soldiers link to the soldiers fighting in Vietnam. It was incredibly moving, and I have never been able to find it again. Does anyone know it? There is the possibliity that my classmate wrote it, he was pretty talented.

I have a fascination for WWI; the whole generation slaughtered, for no reason. I am not big on poems (tho the Regeneration books do a great job depicting the poets themselves), but I have read several books on the topic; here are my favorites

Fiction

>Johnny got his gun Dalton Trumbo

>All quiet on the western front, of course

>Regeneration

>Birds without Wings Louis Beneries

Non fiction

Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman

For more poetry, try this link

Here is a link that might be useful: poetry of the first world war

I just returned from a remembrance service this morning, a properly solemn one. I haven't always attended these ceremonies, but it seems that with every passing year I am more inclined to remember.

Right now, I have in my hand a yellowed copy of Stars and Stripes: Puptent Poets, a paperback publication that my father brought home with him after he was demobilized in 1946. Many of the rhymes are doggerel about nurses, pretty native girls, and what the soldiers would like to do to the enemy (and quite funny, sometimes), but there are also very eloquent and heartrending poems. One that never fails to touch me, though it is one of the shortest and simplest:
UKASE

When this is over
And we come home again,
Forget the band
And the cheers from the stand;
Just have the things
Well in hand --
The things we fought for.
Understand?

-- Pfc. C. G. Tiggas

This is Owen's most famous poem:

Wilfred Owen

STRANGE MEETING

It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall;
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other, "Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something has been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now..."

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Isn't Amy Lowell's famous poem Patterns about a woman who loses her fiancé in WWI? I've always liked her poetry, but that one in particular. I won't post it. You can find it easily enough on the internet.

Oh my gawd.....I remember reading that in HS, and many of my fellow drama students using it for oral interpretation competitions. It was always one of my favorite poems, and hadn't heard of it in decades. Its even more poignant now than it was when I was a naive romantic little 16 year old.
Thanks for the memory!