Read more soldiers' poetry

Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan Brown can remember the day his grandfather introduced him to the poetry of Thomas Hardy. He can remember the day he learnt he would be becoming the deputy chief of staff to a US colonel in Baghdad. He never imagined the two events would one day be linked. Yet here we are, sitting in a quiet London cafe where the only conflict is whether to have an americano or a cappuccino, talking about war, love and death and what draws them together in his writing.

Opening up about his own responses to a military world where he is both witness and enforcer is new territory. Not that it fazes him. Not much would. He’s the kind of direct, decisive 40-year-old you’d feel safe working alongside. With just a few weeks before he moves to Iraq, he’s settled his young family with relatives in the USA and is looking forward to being “in theatre”. But right now it’s words, not warriors, that J B, as he prefers to be called, is contemplating on the front line.

Ever since that conversation with his grandad, an English teacher who claimed, correctly, that Hardy’s verse “will make your hair stand on end”, he’s read and written poetry. Until now it has been a private passion. His men will soon find out about his once-secret scribblings. Does that worry him? “What do you think?” I guess he can handle it. And who’d dare take the mick?

Just last year, one British newspaper was asking, “Where are the war poets?” The author Cyril Connolly was asking the very same question in 1941, suggesting poets should be brought together to cover the second world war, to capture the human experience struggling within the vast scale of historic events in a way newspapers could not. It’s a cry that underscores our trust in the value of a soldier’s raw emotional responses to war and distrust of how others record what they think and feel, a legacy of the continuing emotional response to the iconic literature produced in the first world war. Today, there are a legion of writers and poets who write about war from the comfort of their armchairs, but who would run a mile from a real soldier, assuming it would be impossible to penetrate the armour of jingoism that surrounds servicemen.

At first, J B might appear to fit that caricature. He loves the army — you’ll find no axe to grind with the military in his verse. His role at the heart of the Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq (MNSTC-I) is to support his commander in helping the Iraqi security forces build up their training, equipment and infrastructure before he takes up command of his own regiment next year. Not glamorous, but vital work. He’s served in Germany, Cyprus and Canada, Northern Ireland, the Falkland Islands and the first Gulf war. He was drawn to the army because his father was a soldier for 37 years — joining as a boy soldier and retiring as a major — and because he was “an angry young man”. “Some of the stuff I’ve been writing recently is quite focused on the soldiering side of life — sensibility, honour, all that kind of thing. That’s where the British Army is right now, and I’m part of it, and I know for lots of people those kinds of concepts, like honour and duty and sacrifice, might seem odd, but people in the British Army do still believe in them,” he says.

But his writing is less conventional than that statement suggests. Those values are at the service of a decision-making process and a political world his poetry suggests is askew, out of touch with the lessons of history and unclear about a future direction. War itself has also changed — and with it, a soldier’s sense of his role. In his poem The Promise of Things to Come he ponders what it is to be a soldier, perhaps to be a man. “I’ve spoken to many soldiers in the past 20 years who feel, unless they have been under fire, or in combat, that their service is in some way invalidated. This poem is about that desire to be on operations or in combat with a question over for what reward or at what price.”

One particularly striking poem has him sitting at dinner with a range of leaders from Churchill to Kofi Annan and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Another questions the American dream. Others refer to the random nature of war and who becomes an enemy. And one was inspired by the first coded message sent by Samuel Morse in 1844: “What hath God wrought?”

“We’ve gone from sending Morse code messages to developing nuclear bombs that can obliterate the planet and we’re slowly destroying ourselves,” says J B. “Why did Morse think in that way? Maybe he realised here was a fantastic invention but he was wondering where it was all going to go. And now we are where we are.”

Which is? “Now it’s about remorse. A play on the words. The ultimate remorse is if we don’t get our shit together we’ve got a problem and there’s going to be a lot of wars and we’ll all be dead.”

It’s also a globalised world in which our sense of nationhood is fragmented: “You only have to look at the internet to see our world has changed irrevocably, that sense of globalisation. There are people flying around the world who have been born in one country but never live there again. What does that mean? And in war, it’s not now about lining up hundreds and thousands for a punch-up, it’s about effect.”

In the shadow of Remembrance Sunday, when the horrors of the great war and the deaths of 20m military and civilians are memorialised, a unique body of literature is also recalled. Through the writings of war poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, and the memoirs of Robert Graves, Edward Blunden and others, it’s easy to assume that British poetry also died in the slaughter of the trenches on the western front between 1914 and 1918.

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