years ago and still in school I would go to our local library and take every book on horses to read, and I remember one writer lamenting the changeover from horsepower to mechanized warfare. It lacked the "glamour" of the old calvary and reduced the number of working horses.

My reaction to that viewpoint was disbelief - how could they have been blind to the suffering & misery endured by those poor animals? Memories of the photographs taken of American civil war battlegrounds left little to the imagination as to the carnage done to man & beast. And the medievel section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed not just human armor, but the armor for their mounts and the harsh bits and spurs needed to control them. Some four thousand years of warfare using horses and other critters is more than enough... a pity that humans still can't find better ways to settle their differences.

Given when she lived, the poem is clearly about WWI... but sadly, the sentiment fits far too many other conflicts as well. And that is where to power of the work comes from... it has meaning to people all over the world.