Readings from War Poets to mark the centenary of the end of the Great War
You can find readings from War Poets including the one below, here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBKQgmAn7FngNQlAy_NnKt0BLqZCz55aY
Not all war poets were British men
Not all soldiers were white
Not all battles were fought in Europe
The Neuve-Chapelle Memorial commemorates more than 4,700 Indian soldiers and labourers who lost their lives on the Western Front during the First World War and who have no known grave.
But over 1 million members of the Indian Army served in the Great War - not just on the Western Front but the Near East, Mesopotamia, Gallipoli and East Africa. It won 14 VCs.
62,000 didn't return to India.
Sarojini Naidu was a poet of exceptional quality. Known as "the Nightingale of India", Naidu was a politician as well as a poet: a lifelong fighter for independence who became the first female state governor in her country. Her best-known poem is "The Gift of India" (1915), which describes the dead:
Gathered like pearls in their alien graves
Silent they sleep by the Persian waves,
Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands,
They lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands,
They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance
On the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France . . .