Send Not Your Men Send not your men We have no more need for them The only sound, dawn-lit chorus birds There is stillness now, a silence heard And the guns have fallen silent too And the mist that hung anew As morning broke, was not smoke Of battle or gun. And it did not choke The fields no longer scattered with the bodies of friends The march of death at last at end So light up a cigarette and boil some tea There'll be no more fighting for the dead, or me And those of us by God's will alive Bullet-luck and shell survived At the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day we'll end Send not your men, we have no more need for them _____________________________ The scale of casualties during the first world war is unimaginable. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, British forces lost 19,240 men killed in action. One day. 6 million men were mobilised to fight during the war. A constant stream of men...bakers and bankers, teachers and tailors sent to the front lines. To bolster the troops, to relieve the exhausted and bloodied regiments, but also to replace the wounded and the fallen. But on 11th November 2018, at 11am, the Armistice began. There was no more need to send any more men.
