All for Goddamn Naught* 

Brodie-helmeted, man-beasts barrel toward Vickers-blowing, bayonet-bladed men
Under this glasslike blue skyshell, cross a dead-pocked, grassless fen.
Death-bound screams swell-hollow, among bashed-space and trembling bomb-shook, leafless trees;
Rattling weapons, sibilating bullets, missile shrieks raze silence, the warisons riot the breeze!
Chaotic-thick tangle: buzzing bluebottles, spiraling-wobbled and concussed display more sense.
The lucky-lions Valhalla-bounced fast, the enter-hour metal’s flesh-feast commenced.
While the hapless healthy, drab khaki’d, mudclad boys clashed for four years in the gales of Europe!
And hellbed-ready, war-afar donkeys bayed: “Boys, you may death-quaff, but war too, shall sip her cup!’
What delusioned-goads! for as murder-fell til nil at eleven, and ten million heavened,
And the unslew lines of broken-men wended home, shook, loplimbed, blinded, deafened;
All stretched flimsy thin, yet somehow proud, that their duty done and war future forbade.
But how-extreme sad: witness they, that evil lives, in fact, a greater evil they had made.
For a double-decade down the years, all their slaughter did not alter, Mars’s earthly take.
Their fight was all for goddamn-naught, all their ‘glory’ rot, the war to end all wars was a fake.

NOTES:

*”Brodie” is the type of helmet they wore during World War I.
*Vickers is the type of Gatling gun.
*Lions were what the soldiers were called and donkeys were what the leaders who sent them into the pointless war were called.
*”Murder fell to nil at eleven,” means the war ended November 11th, 1918 at 11 am.
*Mars is the god of war.
*The soldiers wore khakis.
*Bluebottles are just your typical flies.
*Valhalla is the warrior’s heaven.
*”Ten million heavened” – most estimates are that 10 million died in WW1.
*”Double-Decade down the years…” – is the beginning of WWII in 1939, roughly twenty years after the end of WWI.
*”War to End All Wars” is what they called World War I.