A living hell – mud, stench, bodies and gunfire

Do you remember the rats; and the stench

of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench -

And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?

Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen again?"

Do you remember the hour of din before the attack -

And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook

youAs you peered at the doomed and

haggard faces of your men?Do you remember the stretcher-

cases lurching backWith dying eyes and lolling heads -

those ashen-greyMasks of the lads who once were

keen and kind and gay? Seigfried Sassoon

Aftermath

Bombardment Four days the earth was rent and torn

By bursting steel, The houses fell about us;

Three nights we dared not sleep, Sweating, and listening for the imminent crash

Which meant our death.The fourth night every man,

Nerve-tortured, racked to exhaustion, Slept, muttering and twitching,

While the shells crashed overhead.The fifth day there came a hush;

We left our holes And looked above the wreckage of the earth

To where the white clouds moved in silent lines Across the untroubled blue.

Richard Adlington

No Man's Land

No Man's Land is an eerie sight At early dawn in the pale gray light. Never a house and never a hedge

In No Man's Land from edge to edge, And never a living soul walks there

To taste the fresh of the morning air; - Only some lumps of rotting clay,

That were friends or foemen yesterday.

James H. Knight-Adkin

Lost in the swamp and welter of the pit,He flounders off the duck-boards; only he knowsEach flash and spouting crash, - each instant litWhen gloom reveals the streaming rain. He goesHeavily, blindly on. And, while he blunders,"Could anything be worse than this?" - he wonders

Seigfried Sassoon

Remorse

Victims of gas attack

Dulce Et Decorum Est 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.

Wilfred Owen

"Your Attention Please“

   

The Polar DEW has just warned thatA nuclear rocket strike ofAt least one thousand megatonsHas been launched by the enemyDirectly at our major cities.This announcement will takeTwo and a quarter minutes to make,You therefore have a furtherEight and a quarter minutesTo comply with the shelterRequirements published in the CivilDefence Code – section Atomic Attack.

The Vietnam War

He Was A Mate

So how's a bloke supposed to deal with this? I know they trained me well, I can't complain;

But this is somethin' you don't learn about When they teach you how to play the soldier's game.

They teach you how to shoot and how to kill, You even learn which enemy to hate;

But nowhere in their training do you learn How to live with the loss of a real good mate.

Lachlan Irvine

(Australian Vietnam Forces)

WAR IMPACTS ON THE INNOCENT

WAR IMPACTS ON THE INNOCENT

"Back"They ask me where I've been,And what I've done and seen.

But what can I replyWho know it wasn't I,

But someone just like me,Who went across the sea

And with my head and handsKilled men in foreign lands...

Though I must bear the blame,Because he bore my name.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

The Iraq War

• Look closely at the following images

• What ideas could poets focus on

• Evaluate what, if anything has changed from one war to the next

• Comment on whether war poetry from other wars is still relevant today?

WAR IMPACTS ON THE INNOCENT