Will We Remember Them?

Is it possible to do sufficient honour to the young men whose blood stained the desolate battle fields churned by the violence of World War One?
Is it possible to imagine how it was to be flung by the arms of your homeland into the inexorable advance of that roaring machine of death?
Is it possible to imagine the deprivations of life at the Front?
Is it possible to imagine how men, with hopes of an orderly life chipped smaller with every passing day and every comrade`s death, could smile and joke and laugh, and momentarily forget?

I have viewed the cemeteries where they lie, accompanied in their graves by the ever-lasting tears of those whose worlds were shrivelled by their loss; row upon row, and neatly kept, of mothers' sons slain in their thousands, falling hundreds at a time, some dying now, some dying yet.

I cannot comprehend the scale on which these deaths occurred, yet here it is, at me feet, for my eyes to see. I have a sense of guilt because they, not I, endured the test which tested so many to destruction.


Anthem for Doomed Youth
By Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of silent minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.


..........

Is human society doomed, I wonder, to be like the teenage boy whose body outgrew his brain? Whose strength and ability to destroy grow greater, his wisdom still that of a toddler?