Armistice Day/Veteran's Day One Hundred Years After World War I

This year we honor the 100th Anniversary of the start of World War One - the War to End All Wars.

I thought the best way to acknowledge the sacrifice of that generation was with a combination of World War One poetry and photos from  Blood Swept Lands And Seas Of Red - the installation of 888,246 poppies each representing a Commonwealth death.

This is a rather bleak somber post, so I will understand if you chose not to read it.

THE DEAD 

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!

   There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,

   But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.

These laid the world away; poured out the red

Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be

   Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,

   That men call age; and those who would have been,

Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,

   Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.

Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,

   And paid his subjects with a royal wage;

And Nobleness walks in our ways again;

   And we have come into our heritage.

Rupert Brooke, 1914

A MYSTIC AS A SOLDIER

I lived my days apart, 

Dreaming fair songs for God; 

By the glory in my heart 

Covered and crowned and shod. 

Now God is in the strife,

And I must seek Him there, 

Where death outnumbers life, 

And fury smites the air. 

I walk the secret way 

With anger in my brain.

O music through my clay, 

When will you sound again?

Siegfried Sassoon

1915

I’ve watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow, 

In the fields between La Bassée and Bethune; 

Primroses and the first warm day of Spring, 

Red poppy floods of June, 

August, and yellowing Autumn, so 

To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow, 

And you’ve been everything. 

Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack 

In these soul-deadening trenches—pictures, books, 

Music, the quiet of an English wood, 

Beautiful comrade-looks, 

The narrow, bouldered mountain-track, 

The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black, 

And Peace, and all that’s good. 

Robert Graves

"Before Action"

By all the glories of the day
  And the cool evening's benison,

By that last sunset touch that lay

  Upon the hills where day was done,

By beauty lavisghly outpoured

  And blessings carelessly received,

By all the days that I have lived

  Make me a solider, Lord.

By all of man's hopes and fears,

  And all the wonders poets sing,

The laughter of unclouded years,

  And every sad and lovely thing;

By the romantic ages stored

  With high endeavor that was his,

By all his mad catastrophes

  Make me a man, O Lord.

I, that on my familiar hill

  Saw with uncomprehending eyes

A hundred of Thy sunsets spill

  Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,

Ere the sun swings his noonday sword

  Must say goodbye to all of this;--

By all delights that I shall miss,

  Help me to die, O Lord.   W.N.Hodgson 

 

My Boy Jack

Have you news of my boy Jack?'

Not this tide.

'When d'you think that he'll come back?'

Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

'Has anyone else had word of him?'

Not this tide.

For what is sunk will hardly swim,

Not with this wind blowing and this tide.

'Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?'

None this tide,

Nor any tide,

Except he did not shame his kind-

Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,

This tide,

And every tide;

Because he was the son you bore,

And gave to that wind blowing and that tide! 

Rudyard Kipling

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 out 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 gas-shells dropping softly 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 flound'ring 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

 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