Four days the earth was rent and torn
By bursting steel,
The houses fell about us;
Three nights we dared not sleep,
Sweating, and listening for the imminent crash
Which meant our death.

The fourth night every man,
Nerve-tortured, racked to exhaustion,
Slept, muttering and twitching,
While the shells crashed overhead.

The fifth day there came a hush;
We left our holes
And looked above the wreckage of the earth
To where the white clouds moved in silent lines
Across the untroubled blue.

--Richard Aldington

Last night and nightmare of being at Somme during terrible summer of 1916 and barren muddy land is exploding and boiling all around - then trapped, underground, cannot breathe - then awake, confusion, heat, sweat, the window is thrown open and lungs fill with fresh night air, alive. Today there are photographs of The Great War(to end no wars). Few images are more grim than those captured by lenses on the western front. Scenes of unfathomable hardship and doom - the results of a war where intellect lagged well behind the pace of modern technology and mechanization - where soldiers were methodically fed through meat grinders, by order of moronic aristocrats - machine guns, tanks, aeroplanes, mustard & chlorine gas offered up death on a grand, assembly-line scale. Today, it is all largely forgotten.

During the 4 years of the war an average of 5,600 soldiers were killed each day; over 8 and a half million in total - not including civilians and at least one million massacred Armenians . A war protracted by a perpetual stalemate, giving rise to dark miasma of blood/death/destruction/rot which enveloped a Europe gone mad. The British tried to breakthrough German lines with an overwhelming offensive on the Somme. At 7:30 AM on July 1, 1916, with bagpipes playing, boy-soldiers climbed from their trenches and marched onto a lunar No Man's Land and into a storm of flying metal spat from the muzzles of the German boys' machine guns. The British lost 20,000 on that single day alone. Most were volunteers, boys from Cambridge high society, from Yorkshire farms, from Irish slums. Some were poets, some became poets during the war.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas shells that dropped softley behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

--Wilfred Owen (killed in 1918)

I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear . . .
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

--Alan Seeger (killed on the Somme, 7-4-16 - mortally wounded, voice last heard from battlefield crater, crying out for water and for his mother.)

Abridged conclusion for contemporary readers...
When the war ends, nothing is solved. When the war ends, there are few young men left in Europe. A whole generation has been callously disposed of. Many Americans, like my grandfather, travel on steamships to Paris to write & paint & bask in the muse of cheap rent and a low male/female population ratio. A decade long party ensues and everyone begins to for_g__e____t.
The Jazz Age roars thru the 20s with dance & drink & 8 million ghosts.

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

--Ezra Pound, 1920 (poet & future fascist)