I’ve failed at Remembrance Day this year. I’ve been really busy and tired and stuff so I haven’t been able to get to a silence. I can already see the Daily Mail headline: Lesbian pacifist student layabout ‘too tired’ to honour dead soliders!’. No. I’ve been too busy/forgetful for sit still and quiet for two minutes, but I have thought.

For me, the most poigniant descriptions of the First World War come from the poetry. No one except those that were there can even begin to imagine what it was like, but the poetry gives us just a slice of how it felt to be those soliders.

And I do enjoy a bit of Wilfred Owen.

“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 tired, outstripped Five-Nines 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 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,
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.”

- Dulce Et Decorum Est- Wilfred Owen