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“1916” - Motorhead

16 years old when I went to the war,
To fight for a land fit for heroes,
God on my side, and a gun in my hand,
Chasing my days down to zero

And I marched and I fought and I bled
And I died & I never did get any older,
But I knew at the time, That a year in the line,
Was a long enough life for a soldier

We all volunteered,
And we wrote down our names,
And we added two years to our ages,
Eager for life and ahead of the game,
Ready for history’s pages

And we brawled and we fought
And we whored ‘til we stood,
Ten thousand shoulder to shoulder

A thirst for the Hun,
We were food for the gun, and that’s
What you are when you’re soldiers

I heard my friend cry,
And he sank to his knees, coughing blood
As he screamed for his mother

And I fell by his side,
And that’s how we died,
Clinging like kids to each other

And I lay in the mud
And the guts and the blood,
And I wept as his body grew colder

And I called for my mother
And she never came,
Though it wasn’t my fault
And I wasn’t to blame

The day not half over
And ten thousand slain, and now
There’s nobody remembers our names
And that’s how it is for a soldier.

My grandfather wrote several WW1 poems - here’s one:

FIVE STARS AND A CROSS OF GOLD

The little Irish mother kissed her youngest son good-bye.
He was fourth and last to answer to his country’s urgent cry.
Her little world was shattered. Aged, helpless, and all alone.
She turned into the shadows of the quaint old house of stone.
Then, along the darkened hallway to her little sitting room,
She knelt before the Virgin, shining dimly, in the gloom.
On the wall beside it, smiling in his army suit of blue,
Was the picture of the father, dating back to ’62.

Here and there hung crayon portraits of her boys some young, some grown.
And a daughter, long departed, ere the bud to rose had blown.
And, above the horse-hair sofa, in the waning light revealed,
Hung the crimson flag of service, with four starts upon the shield.
One in honor to the father, Captain Jack of Shiloh fame,
Three for those who’d joined the colors, long before the draft law came.
Now, with palsied hands uplifted, and a heart stab in her breast,
The mother pinned the fifth star in the place among the rest.

Summer passed. The guns of Flanders gleaned their harvest, red and dire.
Men went down in tens of thousands ‘neath the cycles of their fire.
Fearfully the Irish mother watched the starts upon the shield.
Two were dead, a third was wounded, fourth still fighting on the field.
Then a message, late in August, found her watching in the night,
Told her how the fourth had fallen in the thickest of the fight.
One start left, its light was feeble, “Almost gone,” a comrade wrote,
“Shrapnel wound,” no hope was offered in his briefly written note.

Then the grim old mother faded when the last faint hope had flown,
Like the fragrant wind-blown climbers on the quaint old walls of stone.
On the casket where she slumbered, lay the flag of service wrought,
Sunshine filtered through the shutters in the house that God forgot,
And the aged priest was saying, while a tear shown in his glance,
“Greater were this mother’s battles than those fought in distant France.
Vastly was her valor greater than of husband or of son,
For she gave five lives in glory, while the others gave but one.”
Then he bent above the banner and, with fingers gnarled and old,
In the center laid his tribute – laid his cross of virgin gold.
Will Ferrell