On the week leading up to Remembrance Sunday, war is the sombre theme. The novelist John Buchan lost his young brother at Arras in 1917 and penned this emotional tribute to him, contrasting the human drama and tragedy with the unchanging natural world. Buchan was Director of Information in the Lloyd George Government during the First World War and included powerful impressions of trench warfare in his thriller Mr Standfast (1919).

A mile or two from Arras town
The yellow moorland stretches far,
And from its crest the roads go down
Like arrows to the front of war.
 
All day the laden convoys pass,
The sunburnt troops are swinging by,
And far above the trampled grass
The droning planes climb up the sky.
 
In April when I passed that way
An April joy was in the breeze;
The hollows of the woods were gay
With slender-stalked anemones.
 
The horn of Spring was faintly blown,
Bidding a ransomed world awake,
Nor could the throbbing batteries drown
The nesting linnets in the brake.
 
And as I stood beside the grave,
Where ’mid your kindly Scots you lie,
I could not think that one so brave,
So glad of heart, so kind of eye,
 
Had found the deep and dreamless rest,
Which men may crave who bear the scars
Of weary decades on their breast,
And yearn for slumber after wars.
 
You scarce had shed your boyhood’s years,
In every vein the blood ran young,
Your soul uncramped by ageing fears,
Your tales untold, your songs unsung.
 
As if my sorrow to beguile,
I heard the ballad’s bold refrain:
‘I’ll lay me down and bleed a-while,
And then I’ll rise and fight again.’