Brian Blessed narrates this account of war poetry throughout the ages to WWI. Oxford professor Jon Stallworthy provides a critique of the works cited, whilst archive footage and specially commissioned images combine to bring the poems to life.
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In Flanders Field was missed.
Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński
(1921-1944) Fell in the Warsaw Uprising, August 4. 1944
From dreams that like butterflies quiver—my son—they sundered you,
And embroidered your sad eyes with blood’s ruddy scarlet hue;
And whole landscapes they adorned in stitches of blazes yellow,
In a sea of swaying trees, sewed in scaffolds of your hanged fellow.
They taught you, my little boy, to know your land by heart,
As you blazed her very trails shedding iron tears.
They raised you in the dark, weaned you on a loaf of fears;
You were left to grope your path through the basest human part.
And into the night you went, my bright son, armed with but a dark gun,
And you felt how evil bristles in each minute’s sound.
Before you fell, with your hand you crossed the earth first.
Was it a bullet, my little boy, or a heart that burst?
March 20, 1944
It is quite strange that listening to war poems in English automatically leads to the thought of a total lack of theirs sincerity. Where this radical devaluation is coming from?
These poems were so well read. They, and the men who wrote them, deserve to be remembered.
I'm struggling to think of a single example of a contemporary war poem written by someone with no experience of war