A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?

Commemorating the centenary of Armistice of the First World War, this short film combines three poems written by men who died in the bloody conflict. Their poignant words are linked together by a loose narrative rendered in cut-out puppetry, forming something of a three-act exploration of the war from the perspective of those who fought in it. In the poem ‘The Owl’ (1915) by the English writer Edward Thomas, a narrator considers the gap between those to whom discomfort is a temporary nuisance, and the ‘soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice’. In ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (1920) by the English poet Wilfred Owen, a narrator spares no horrific detail while describing the experience of chemical warfare. And the Canadian poet John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’ (1915) is told, quite hauntingly, from the perspective of the war’s buried dead.