World War 1 may stand alone as the most egregious slaughter of the youth of Europe of all time. Old tactics of human wave attacks ran head on into the new technology of killing, the machine gun, howitzer, and mustard gas. 57,000 English soldiers died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, ordered into the German defenses by men who felt that England had a Blood Debt to pay to the French and Russians, who had previously sacrificed more troops. Eventually, the reality of these horrific mechanisms caused the armies to dig in, spawning the new nightmare of trench warfare. By the War's end, any pretense of glory had been disgarded by those who served. Great poetry came from this war, from men like Sigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, many of whom died in the conflict. Here is a sample, which I don't think is out of place as we remember those last survivors.

Wilfed Owen
GREATER LOVE

Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

Your slender attitude
Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,
Rolling and rolling there
Where God seems not to care;
Till the fierce love they bear
Cramps them in death's extreme decrepitude.

Your voice sings not so soft,--
Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft,--
Your dear voice is not dear,
Gentle, and evening clear,
As theirs whom none now hear,
Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.

Heart, you were never hot
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;
And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail:
Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.