Poetry at war

I am currently reading Gilbert Martin's World War I, A Complete History. It's like the 4th book in a row, fiction and nonfiction, that I've read about the war. I wasn't sure I'd be able to digest the entire scope of it, but Martin does a lucid job framing the fight in three-month increments. He moves effortlessly between the growing number of fronts; depicting strategies and battles with overall statistics, layers of complexities, fine maps, and some hard-to-avoid editorializing.

What keeps it from being a cold analytical chronology is that each two-page spread of the text contains at least three or four letters or quotes or poems by particular combatants that are just withering in their poignancy and as illustrations of the privations, horrors, and relentlessness of the ordeal. It is the poetry not just of Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon that Martin uses, but that of several common soldiers who turned to poetry, almost as a sanctuary, to create a moment beauty and reflection where there was none to be had.