[Romulus]

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

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 tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped 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.

[PUGACHEV]

I read him first when I was in school, and have always appreciated Wilfred Owens' poetry since. His Strange Meeting is part of Benjamin Britten's beautiful War Requiem. "I parried; but my hands were loath and cold": how can one read that an not shiver?

Now that I'm a bit older, I prefer Keith Douglass, whose unlucky fate in WWII mirrors that of Owens.

HOW TO KILL

 Under the parabola of a ball,
 a child turning into a man,
 I looked into the air too long.
 The ball fell in my hand, it sang
 in the closed fist: Open Open
 Behold a gift designed to kill.

 Now in my dial of glass appears 
 the soldier who is going to die.
 He smiles, and moves about in ways
 his mother knows, habits of his.
 The wires touch his face: I cry
 Now. Death, like a familiar, hears

 and look, has made a man of dust
 of a man of flesh. This sorcery
 I do. Being damned, I am amused
 to see the centre of love diffused
 and the waves of love travel into vacancy.
 How easy it is to make a ghost.

 The weightless mosquito touches
 Her tiny shadow on the stone,
 and with how like, how infinite
 a lightness, man and shadow meet.
 They fuse. A shadow is a man
 when the mosquito death approaches.

and

VERGISSMEINNICHT

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.