But the old man would not so, but slew his son,And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

They bright whiten all this sepulchre with powdered chloride of lime. It’s a perfectly sanitary war.

If you can walk with the crowd and keep your virtue, or walk with Kings-nor lose the common touch; If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; If all men count with you, but...

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War....

As suddenly the whole world would slip back into a mollifying, untormented dark; their aching bodies knew its calm.

I never heard communism seriously propounded or argued; perhaps I was too deeply preoccupied with my own dissipations; and, as it turned out in the end it was a way of thought that I was...

McKay had worn the wings in the world war with honor, flying first with the French and later with his own country’s forces. And as a bird loves the trees, so did McKay love them....

But how intolerable bright the morning is where we who are alive and remain, walk lifted up, carried forward by an effective word.

France is to me the heroine in the romance of all the nations of all time. This feeling was born in me years ago when I read how her noble sons had defended America in...

(On WWI:)A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war. It seemed a laborious method...

… We had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.

The landscape had been so maimed by this new kind of warfare it was as if human architects of great genius had sat down to plan hell, since no two of them could agree on...

We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.

Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.

He had volunteered early, rather than waiting to be conscripted, for he felt a duty and an obligation to serve, and believed that … being willing to fight for his country and the liberty it...

Men were snoring, twitching and whimpering, struggling with nightmares less terrible than reality.

MCMXIVThose long uneven linesStanding as patientlyAs if they were stretched outsideThe Oval or Villa Park,The crowns of hats, the sunOn moustached archaic facesGrinning as if it were allAn August Bank Holiday lark;And the shut shops,...

Happy Birthday.

Victorious troops are those who kill more, and here we were the victims. This put the finishing touch to our demoralisation. The soldiers had lost conviction long ago. Now they lost confidence.

I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting (WWI) to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will...

There’s nothing funny about war. Well, aside from this joke Orafoura told me: What did WWI say to WWII? I wish I could tell you the punch line, but the restaurant was so noisy that...

World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our...

Dear Mary Duende, It’s freezing here in the trenches, but loneliness is colder than any hyperthermia. Gunshots and shrapnel have become my companions. But life is better now than it was when I was at...

If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than the war.[Apology to the international anti-submarine committee for being absent from several meetings during...

When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was:...

For they were unseasoned, nor inured, not knowing this to be much less than the beginning of sorrow.

It is as if Quincey has replaced the sun in my universe and it is around him that I spin.

Mute in that golden silence hung with green,Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyesRemembrance of all beauty that has been,And stillness from the pools of Paradise.

…and how is a man to know the habits of their God, whether He smites suddenly or withholds, if you mishandle the things set apart, the objects of His people He is jealous of.

It was such a heavenly dream: dreamed between the reality of war and the reality of hereditary madness.