War Poetry Week on Classic Poetry Aloud will include:

• From fears in solitude – Coleridge

• The man with the wooden leg – Mansfield

• Balls Bluff – Herman Melville

• A speech from Henry V – Shakespeare

• The Soldier – Rupert Brooke

• Strange Meeting – Wilfred Owen

• And, on Sunday, From ‘for the fallen’ by Lawrence Binyon.

To begin with, two poems taken from Kipling’s ‘Epitaphs of the Great War’, compiled after the war, and one letter, from his son.

A Dead Statesman

I could not dig: I dared not rob:

Therefore I lied to please the mob.

Now all my lies are proved untrue

And I must face the men I slew.

What tale shall serve me here among

Mine angry and defrauded young?"

The Last Letter of John Kipling

Dear F -

Just a hurried line as we start off tonight. The front line trenches are nine miles off from here so it wont be a very long march.

This is THE great effort to break through & end the war.

The guns have been going deafeningly all day, without a single stop.

We have to push through at all costs so we won't have much time in the trenches, which is great luck.

Funny to think one will be in the thick of it tomorrow.

One's first experience of shell fire not in the trenches but in the open.

This is one of the advantages of a Flying Division, you have to keep moving.

We marched 18 miles last night in the pouring wet.

It came down in sheets steadily.

They are staking a tremendous lot on this great advancing movement as if it succeeds the war won't go on for long.

You have no idea what enormous issues depend on the next few days.

This will be my last letter most likely for some time as we won't get any time for writing this next week, but I will try & send Field post cards.

Well so long old dears.

Dear love

John

Epitaph

If any question why we died,

Tell them, because our fathers lied.