====
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Siegfried Sassoon: Selections on war
====
Siegfried Sassoon
Ex-Service
Derision from the dead
Mocks armamental madness.
Redeem (each Ruler said)
Mankind. Men died to do it.
And some with glorying gladness
Bore arms for earth and bled:
But most went glumly through it
Dumbly doomed to rue it.
The darkness of their dying
Grows one with War recorded;
Whose swindled ghosts are crying
From shell-holes in the past,
Our deeds with lies were lauded,
Our bones with wrongs rewarded.
Dream voices these — denying
Dud laurels to the last.
Source