10/10 WW1 poems

Recruitment during WW1, Image by Smabs Sputzer shared under a CC licence available at flickr.com

Teachers across the country are deciding how best to commemorate the WW1 centenary with their classes. Poetry is always a popular choice and rightly so as good war poetry can hold the essence of the war experience and emotion in a few succinct images. So here to help with forward planning are ten poems from or about WW1. You won’t find Owen, Graves or Sassoon here – we figure you can track them down easily enough for yourselves. Instead we’ve found some oft ignored treasures, some written during WW1 and some modern but all with something important to say about the experience of war and from the perspectives of people born or resident in Scotland.

1. ‘When you see millions of the mouthless dead / Across your dreams in pale battalions go,’ from ‘When you see Millions of the Mouthless Dead‘ by Charles Hamilton Sorley, often seen as a stylistic forerunner of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.
2. ‘marching / stoop-shouldered / down red brick streets / every year’ from  ‘The country I come from‘ by Tom Bryan published in Until The Rook Falls In (Indigo Dreams, 2011).
3. ‘I had fifty sons / When we went up in the evening
 / Under the arch of the guns,‘ from ‘In Memoriam‘, E. Alan Mackintosh’s powerful and touching poem honouring a dead soldier from his company, published in A Highland Regiment (John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1917).
4. ‘A feck o’ sodgers passed that way / And garred me often straucht my back.’ from ‘The Great Ones‘ by John Buchan, author of The Thirty-nine Steps.
5. ‘An’ it’s nae wi’ stane or airn / But wi’ brakin’ herts, an’ mem’ries sair, / That we’re biggin’ the Soldiers’ Cairn.’ from ‘The Soldiers’ Cairn‘ by Mary Symon whose poems were widely recognised as describing the terrible impact of WW1 on the Scottish people. 
6. ‘rough men proclaim / Sadly, that Fritz, the merry, is no more. / (Or shall we call him Jack? It’s all the same.)’ from ‘The Sniper‘ by W.D. Cocker, published in Poems Scots and English (Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1932). 
7. ‘All sixty volunteered for the touring squad, / And swapped their Richmond turf for Belgian ditches.’ from ‘London Scottish‘ by Mick Imlah, published in The Lost Leader (Faber and Faber, 2008).
8. ‘What d’ye think o’ the fields o’ Flanders? / Jockey lad, are ye glad ye came?‘ from ‘Hey, Jock, are ye Glad ye Listed‘ by Neil Munro, author of the Para Handy stories.
9.  ‘Fat civilians wishing they / “Could go out and fight the Hun.” / Can’t you see them thanking God /That they’re over forty-one?’ from ‘Recruiting‘, a much more sarcastic and satirical poem than 3. above, by E. Alan Mackintosh, published in War, The Liberator (John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1918).
10. ‘A lass raxed oot for the list, to read – / “Weel, wounded, missin’, deid “‘ from ‘When Will the War Be By?‘ by Charles Murray, published in  Hamewith: collected poems (Alden, 2008).