Great War

Image: Romania, history of: Romanian dead on the road near Kronstadt during World War I
address
 
 

 The real reason for the ceremonies and parades and speeches is to keep young men keen to go and kill and die, there being no group of humans more subject to cheap emotional appeals about glory and heroism than young men, as we see, ad nauseam, generation after generation.

My Dad and my Uncle were in World War One.
At least they were in it, but not in it:
Conscripted but never committed.
My Dad was called up in 1915,
And then run over by a field gun
In an army camp at Lydd marsh in Kent,
So he never actually made it
Across the Channel to fight.
His pelvis and both legs were crushed,
In his first week, in a training exercise,
By a Howitzer rolling downhill.
It weighed over thirty hundredweight.
While pushing and dragging the gun up a slope