‘A whole sweet countryside amuck with murder'. War Poetry and the Flemish Frontline

The soldier-poets who died, and those who survived the First World War, shared a range of emotions; fear, anger, despair, fatigue, boredom, humour, homesickness, compassion and grief generated by the cruel and extraordinary conditions under which they existed. They symbolise all the combatants who fought each other over four tragic years. Their names will be evoked whenever their poetry and prose is read and studied by future generations and when pilgrims walk in reverent homage across the blood-soaked battle fields of Flanders. (with six war poems by Hugo Claus, John McCrae, Thomas Ernest Hulme, Julian Grenfell, Herbert Read and Edmund Blunden)