Another Poem in Memory.

I had to post this as it still makes cry today as it did the first time
I read it 36 years ago for my "O" levels.
I can still recite most of it from memory.
It also now reminds me of my Father who was my English teacher
and Headmaster at school in Derbyshire.
He spent his war years as an R.A.M.C. medic in west Africa and Normandy.
He never ever really wanted to carry a side arm, and when he did he
never would have fired it in anger.
As he spoke good German he mainly looked after the German injured.
He never talked about the things he saw, but just about the
funny / interesting things that happened to him.
Like the day the horse he had been feeding followed him into the ward
much to the the anger of the Matron.
He was going to be a Vicar, it had all be put in place for when he left the army, but the war changed his mind.
He chose to be an English teacher and to open his students minds using
in part the War Poets.
Up to the day he died he had an interest in the war poets, old and new.
I think it was the effects of war on these people, what they
saw and felt that really drove his passion to show to the
young generation the horrors of war.
The only time I saw him cry other than when Mum died was on
Remembrance Sunday.
When I asked him why, his reply was

"I am remembering my lost friends".


I miss him.



WILFRED OWEN
1893 - 4th November 1918 (1 week before the end of WWI)

The Greatest English poet of the First World War


ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH[

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out3 their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented6 choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

"Wastage" was what they called it at Haig's GHQ. By mid 1917 it was 35,000 a week. Yes, that's right thirty-five thousand men a week, dead, wounded or missing.

It never seems to have occurred to the Donkeys that the human capital of their nation was a finite resource.

The contemporary attempts to whitewash this murderous incompetence would be laughable, if there was anything funny about it.