• Some of the finest and most memorable literature and poetry of the twentieth century came from the generation who experienced the Great War. These are three of the most famous poems of the Great War, all written by soldiers during the war. Rupert Brooks’s “The Soldier” is the most famous of a series of sonnets he wrote in 1914. Brooks died on April 23, 1915, at the age of twenty-seven while traveling with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force to Gallipoli. John McCrae, a Canadian doctor, published “In Flanders Fields” in December 1915. He died of pneumonia while serving at a Canadian field hospital in northern France on January 28, 1918. British poet Wilfred Owen wrote “Dulce et Decorum Est” in 1917. He was killed in battle a week before the armistice on November 4, 1918.

Rupert Brooks, “The Soldier”

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields”

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from falling hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith, with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

Wilfred Owen, “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 gas shells dropping softly 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 floundering 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 [It is sweet and fitting]

Pro patria mori. [To die for one’s country.]

Source: Jon Silkin, ed., The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, 2d ed. rev. (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1996), pp. 81–82, 85, 192–193.

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