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Those great poets understood the power of the spoken and remembered word before film and photography became the more favoured medium for capturing war. And it wasn’t just the officer class who knew their verse: recitation was a common party piece and the English language a key part of the tommy’s sense of nationhood. Writings from the ranks archived at the Imperial War Museum in London reveal the ordinary man’s literary heritage. Surely today’s troops haven’t all lost that capacity?

Apparently not. J B is not unique. To date I have found seven UK serving soldiers and one medical officer in the navy who write poetry. This followed an appeal by the Ministry of Defence, on behalf of Poet in the City, in Soldier magazine. The poets gathered here will be part of a London event being organised by the charity next year.

Each serviceman and woman has a unique voice: the dental nurse with a sweet lyricism who has to fix the faces of the wounded, the colonel doctor proud to be piecing together shattered lives and bodies, the bomb-disposal expert who writes with a contemporary edginess about unimaginable horror or the Territorial Army recruit, angry at the world and eager to change it. How many more in the services are penning verses, letters, journals, stories? Could this be the tip of an iceberg?

Major David Hamilton believes so. His own poetry reveals a keen eye for observation in a lyrical tradition he says springs from an early passion for Wordsworth — he recites some verses from memory. He’s also influenced by Tennyson and the first-world-war poets. It’s disciplined, often heartbreaking and tender writing, a testament to ordinary sufferings whether in war or at home. He’s a restrained individual, who recently left the army after 34 years but who may return next year.

One of eight growing up in poverty in a Durham village, he left school at 16, enlisted as a junior soldier in the Light Infantry in 1974, and has been married to his childhood sweetheart, Greta, since 1976. He appears to have absorbed the complexities of pain and beauty from an early age and his first poetry book, Manic Verse, was published last year, just before his 50th birthday.

He first read the first-world-war poets as a 17-year-old: “That was going to be the war to end all wars. Anything that came out of it was seen as a record of the last of its kind. There was no means of communicating the message or the horror other than through poetry. They didn’t have cine cameras in the way they did in the second world war. All they had at the time were these little books of poetry sent out from the front.”

He’s aware that life in the army today, one in which it’s quite possible to see very little action, can’t compare. Even so, he’s seen events he feels he still doesn’t have the words for. There are many military poems in his collection, including Soldier with a Tattoo, which refers to a soldier horribly burnt in Iraq who had the word “Unscarred” tattooed on the unburnt flesh on his stomach. “What he meant I don’t know, what a statement to make. This guy is going to be like this, damaged by third- and fourth-degree burns for the rest of his life, yet for some reason he wanted those words on his body.” It’s clear he feels a sense of responsibility for the youngsters who have been in his care. He says there’s still much more to write, particularly from his experience of Northern Ireland: “You suddenly become aware that somewhere in your writing you are recording events but you’ve missed some, you’ve missed stuff that was important at the time but you weren’t perhaps thinking about it.”

War poetry may have a value in capturing moments and emotions that might otherwise escape us, but none of it is currently being collated. A rich seam of social history is seeping away in the UK — though not in the United States. There the US National Endowment for the Arts has collected thousands of pages of soldiers’ stories in letters, journals, e-mails and poetry, which now form part of a national literary archive.

A book of the collected work, Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of US Troops and Their Families, was published in 2006. Writers including Tom Clancy, Tobias Wolff and Marilyn Nelson visited US bases encouraging soldiers to write intimately about what they lived through. The writers involved have now developed a programme for hospitals, encouraging rehabilitating soldiers to record their thoughts. One of those writers is the 41-year-old poet Brian Turner, who gained a masters degree in poetry before serving seven years in the US army. He was an infantry-team leader for a year in Iraq and also spent time in Bosnia. He has just finished a book tour, reading from Here, Bullet, his remarkable collection of poetry on the Iraq war. His words, some of which are extracted here, are haunting, expressing enormous compassion for soldiers, the enemy, civilians and the traditions of Middle Eastern poetry. This is from the poem Repatriation Day:

The skeletons rest in their boxes
still slack-jawed twenty years later,
as if amazed at their own deaths.

I want to lie down among them,
to be wrapped in sheets like the flags
of nations, banded in light and shadow.

I want the Red Cross worker to lean over,
so I can see that tired look in her eyes
as she writes down my name.

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