Sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland.

I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears; and caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts; and buckled with a smile Mausers and Colts; and rusted every bayonet with His tears.

The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.

No-man's land under snow is like the face of the moon: chaotic, crater ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.

After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.

Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!

I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.