Observance obligation...

Lest we forget...Is War Poetry something we shouldn't cherish as much as we do because it reminds us of all of the horrors of war and in particular the suffering? Yeats thought so:

"If war is necessary, or necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever, remembering our comfort at midnight when our temperature fell, or as we forget the worst moments of more painful disease."

Others think so too: Dr. Stuart Lee (involved in Oxford Uni's JISC Project on First World War Poetry digital archive) writes that "As early as 1930, Jerrould Douglas criticised the swelling number of literary works (novels, poems, memoirs, etc.) as being miseading as they left the reader with an impression that the War was inherently wrong, and the slaughter on the battlefields was avoidable. More recently, Peter Liddle in his study of the Battle of the Somme (1992), whilst recognising the power and literary merit of the poems themselves, states that they did not portray the 'conformity and continuity' of the average soldier"

The digital archive is 'building on the success' of Oxford University's Wilfred Owen archive. In mid August 1917 Wilfred Owen met both Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves; he was influenced by both and the following October wrote both "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum Est". Unlike the latter two Owen died in action only a week before the ceasefire now known as Armistice Day. The wearing of the poppy, a weed in Europes's cereal crops, was inspired or at least influenced by Canadian medic John McCrae's In Flander's Fields - although many of the poems speak of the young McCrae was 42 when he joined up. Their poems go some way to remind us of the horror, that we should not forget. The numbers killed in WWI the battles are abosloutely mind-boggling and now we remember all the fallen - not just the First World War - indeed we should not forget and we should be obliged to remember.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

This from Laurence Binyon's "For the Fallen"

Lest we forget...