Last night I completed a novella I've been working on for the past two weeks.  Still untitled, it's set during the First World War- a period that''s always fascinated me.

With World War Two, we tend to think about it is an epic good-and-evil clash.   Its imagery is constantly mobilised by our lying, warmongering fucks of politicians to justify modern day wars of aggression e.g. Iraq and the rest of the so-called 'war on terror'.   You can't do that with the First World War.

All that comes to mind is the hideous, pointless, stupid, downright evil waste of it all.  Millions and millions of people killed.  The insanity of the 'human wave' charges against machine guns- where you had to walk double-time, not run.  The men shot for 'desertion' or 'cowardice' because their minds had broken under a strain no human being could tolerated.  Death by mustard gas, phosgene, chlorine.  The people maimed, insane, or so hideously mutilated.   If you want to see what war really does, here are some photos, collected by the German pacifist Ernst Friedrich in his book 'War Against War'.  Be warned- these are not pleasant.  But they are the truth.

The war's legacy still lingers on.  It changed Europe, even the world, forever.  The physical legacy too- the 'lost generation' of young men, wiped out in Belgium and France on the Western Front.   Human remains are still unearthed to this day, on the old battlefields of Passchendale/Ypres or the Somme.  In Houlthulst, Belgium, there's a stockpile of unexploded gas shells, still being added to each day.

I'm sorry if this makes for depressing reading, or if you already knew all this.  I've spent the last fortnight immersed in this subject- the poetry of Owen, Sassoon and others, and this website, which has been particularly valuable.

My great-grandfather, Richard Lynam, fought in the First World War.  He lost an arm, and died of throat cancer which may have been contributed to by gas poisoning.  The piece I've just written's certainly rekindled my interest in my family- where we came from, what we did.  But mostly, the piece and the background work for it has left me with an overwhelming sense of sorrow and disgust.  And the young men still go marching off, to be slaughtered in Iraq, and elsewhere, for the lies and falsehoods of their leaders.

I want to finish with this poem by Charles Hamilton Sorley.  He's not as well known as Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon, but that might be because he was killed in 1915, very early on, with only a small body of work to his name.  To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of copyright.  Please let me know if you know different.  It was the last poem Sorley ever wrote; he was killed a few days later.  He was twenty years old.

When you see millions of the mouthless dead

Across your dreams in pale battalions go,

Say not soft things as other men have said,

That you'll remember. For you need not so.

Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know

It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?

Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.

Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.

Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,

"Yet many a better one has died before."

Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you

Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,

It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.

Great death has made all his for evermore.