This month’s YWI winner is a poem written by Sebastian for Walter,

his great, great-grandfather, who died in France in September 1917.

He was one of the Soldiers of the Great War.

Soldiers of the Great War

Though we may not be here today,

We were in the thick of the fight,

And the dark of night.

You name it We were there.

We were the Soldiers of the Great War.

We were the brave,

The Naive. We were the rats in the mud,

The knights in the sky,

The ghosts of the desert,

And yet;

We were the kids in the sand.

We were the Soldiers of the Great War.

We threw ourselves at the enemy.

Measuring victory in yards.

And Failure in corpses.

One second you were a person,

Living.

The next.

A statistic.

A sanitation problem.

We were Forgotten.

We were the Soldiers of the Great War.

We were too young.

Fighting without accounting for modern inventions.

This wasn’t our father’s war.

No more bright uniforms,

No more lined formations,

Just;

Barbed wire,

The Armoured engine’s whine,

Rapid fire,

And the steel birds of the sky.

We were killed nearly instantly.

We were the Soldiers of the Great War.

We were shipped off,

Expecting glory.

Instead, we found hell and gore.

We were too unprepared.

We were the soldiers of the Great War.

Dirt,

Rain,

Mud.

It drowned us.

Covered our uniforms,

Decayed our weapons.

We were killed by it.

We were the Soldiers of the Great War.

We were pawns.

Except,

No matter how hard we tried,

No matter how we played.

We would never become queens.

We were stuck in a cycle of killing and dying.

We were the Soldiers of the Great War.

We came from around the world,

Four empires and twenty-six countries.

Millions of us.

We were so different.

Yet,

A uniform was all that separated us.

We were the same.

We were the Soldiers of the Great War.

F our empires fell by the end.

Millions died.

We gave our today for their tomorrow.

Yet,

So many of our names have been forgotten.

We were discarded,

We were the Soldiers of the Great War.

We didn’t know who wanted to start fighting.

We just wanted to fight the good fight.

To become men.

But,

We were still boys at the end.

We were the Soldiers of the Great War.