THIS year's commemoration of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War reaches a climax with Remembrance Sunday (November 9) and Armistice Day two days later.
Our sequence of poems on this most sombre of subjects starts with one by Perth-born William Soutar, who served in the Royal Navy in the First World War and lived till 1943, though he was bedridden for the last 13 years of his life. The young men of whom he wrote could have belonged to either World War.
THE PERMANENCE OF THE YOUNG MEN
No man outlives the grief of war
Though he outlive its wreck:
Upon the memory a scar
Through all his years will ache.
Hopes will revive when horrors
cease;
And dreaming dread be stilled;
But there shall dwell within his
peace
A sadness unannulled.
Upon his world shall hang a sign
Which summer cannot hide:
The permanence of the young
men
Who are not by his side.
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