The Great War and the Good War

When you see millions of the mouthless dead Across your dreams in pale battalions go, Say not soft things as other men have said, That you'll remember. For you need not so. Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know It is not curses heaped on each gashed head? Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow. Nor honour. It is easy to be dead. Say only this, 'They are dead.' Then add thereto, 'Yet many a better one has died before.' Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you Perceive one face that you loved heretofore, It is a spook. None wears the face you knew. Great death has made all his for evermore. Charles Hamilton Sorley

Charles Hamilton Sorley was born in 1895 and killed during The Great War at the Battle of Loos on the 13th of October 1915. He was 20 years old, and had been serving in the trenches since May of 1915. In a letter to his brother he had written: "All illusions about the splendour of war will, I hope, be gone after the war."

The Good War by Francine C. Schwieder A scan of a lithograph I made from Xeroxed photos of World War II, which I had assembled as a collage to demonstrate a new lithographic technique to a print class at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California. For other pieces on war see Fire Figure Gold, Grief Figure, and the Bosch War in the Photoshop Gallery.

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