I want to pay a brief homage to today, the day set aside to honour the many millions of war dead. I didn’t venture out to attend a ceremony on this cold, wet morning. Instead, I held my own small memorial for all the soldiers and civilians who’ve died, and continue to die, in too many wars.

The scale of the slaughter in the First and Second World Wars is unimaginable to most of us. The Great War was particularly horrific; the "war to end all wars," in which a whole generation of men was lost. Imagine if nearly every man you knew was killed or terribly maimed in a four-year period. That was the reality of Europe and the Commonwealth in 1914-1918. And in some ways, the ones who died were luckier than those who survived. They didn’t have to re-live the nightmares of trench and mustard gas warfare, they weren’t shellshocked, and their mental and physical health wasn’t destroyed.

Rupert Brooke

Tragic events often create great art, and many of my favourite poets and authors hail from that era. Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Erich Maria Remarque, Herman Hesse, John McCrae (In Flanders Fields), and Vera Brittain are but a few of them. 

Vera Brittain

Brittain has impressed me since I was a girl, and the BBC-TV mini-series, Testament of Youth, based on her memoir, remains one of the best indictments of war that I have ever seen. Brittain, a war nurse, was the only one of her “set” growing up to survive the First World War; she lost her fiance, and was nearly killed herself. I still have trouble comprehending that kind of personal loss and devastation, and an even harder time knowing that it continues as I write this. 

Wilfred Owen

 A poem by Wilfred Owen, whose parents received word of his death at the same time as the first Armistice bells were ringing on Nov. 11, 1918, sums up my thoughts as only a great poet can.

My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity. — Owen

Futility

Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds -
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, – still warm, – too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?