Remembering

I was caught out this year by Armistice Day falling mid-week, and the Remembrance Sunday events all being scheduled for the preceding weekend.  I usually like to mark the occasion with an appropriate war poem.   Here we are, then - better late than never - one of my favourite pieces by Wilfred Owen.  (People generally only seem to know a few of his better known poems - Anthem For Doomed Youth, Dulce et Decorum Est, and perhaps Strange Meeting.  However, that's just scratching the surface.  There's tremendous variety in his poems of the war, and an impressively high quality through most of them.)     The Send-Off   Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way To the siding-shed, And lined the train with faces grimly gay. Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray As men's are, dead. Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp Stood staring hard, Sorry to miss them from the upland camp. Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp Winked to the guard. So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went. They were not ours: We never heard to which front these were sent. Nor there if they yet mock what women meant Who gave them flowers. Shall they return to beatings of great bells In wild trainloads? A few, a few, too few for drums and yells, May creep back, silent, to village wells Up half-known roads.   Wilfred Owen  (1893-1918)