Inspired by Erich Maria Remarque's World War I war novel All Quiet on the Western Front, set to the meter/rhyme scheme of Wilfred Owen's World War I war poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est."


How would it change me, I have asked, to see
Amid the blood a generation lost?
Why is that war forgotten when to be
Among them was to pay so high a cost?
From death-infested filth of trenches' mud
To bomb-rent desolated No Man's Land
They hear a plea where dying choke on blood,
But none can find them, none can lend a hand.
The shells so scream that veterans know their signs,
But young recruits fall heedless to the blast;
The scouts are trapped in ever-changing lines,
And hear the bloody hacks from soldiers gassed.
O fearful spectacle! Why must they die?
What glorious purpose has their ill-fate served?
Why were they sent with such a dangerous lie
By cowards to a horror undeserved?
The generation lost—so many shot,
Blown up, stabbed, gassed, with ever-cheapening life,
Yet even one who drew not this fell lot
Is lost amid his home by dreadful strife.
How have the battle-trenches come to seem
So much more real than what once was all
They knew? How could men, brought to this extreme,
Return again the same, though did not fall?
Alas! First to the war in filth and grime,
With life and soul to ravaging renders tossed,
And now to history's mist and rolling time,
A generation lost.


A/N: I have not studied World War I in detail, my knowledge limited to All Quiet on the Western Front and a few chapters of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, and as you may have guessed this was another school project; requirements aside, however, I just sat on my bed and cried for a couple minutes at the end of All Quiet, and I hope what little I do know and feel was duly conveyed in this poem.

Sophia the Scribe