Wars and Poems

I have been free and idle for the last couple of months. What started off as my annual leave has degenerated into a forced holiday waiting for the power-to-be to process my registration etc. Talk about bureaucracy. In my spare time, I borrowed some books from the local library on the two world wars. What truly appalled me was the number of death. Hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed on the altar of war senselessly, sometimes in just a single battle. At the end of each world war, there were tens of million of death.

There are a couple of poems written during the first world war that are particularly poignant and famous. The first was written by a Canadian field doctor, Lieutenant Colonel Dr. John McCrae, In Flanders Field:

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 down, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders Fields.

Take up our quarrels 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.

The second was longer, written by Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen. Some of the stanzas are:

.....

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 uncounted;

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, or the years contemn.

At the going of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

They mingled not with their laughing comrades again;

They sit no more at familiar tables of home;

They have no lot in our labour of day-time;

They sleep beyond England's foam.

.....

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,

Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;

As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,

To the end, to the end, they remain.