THIS weekend it will be Remembrance Sunday and, as chaplain to the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers Chapel, I have the annual honour of leading their evocative commemoration at the war memorial in the City and then preaching for the church service.

Next year the commemoration of the First World War will begin and the BBC is thinking hard about which samples of war poetry to set before us. It would be encouraging if we could expect something other than the Blackadder version of modern history and the cliches about “lions led by donkeys,”

but my hopes are not too high.

No doubt the star of the occasion will be Wilfred Owen and his declaration that: “I am not concerned with poetry. My subject is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.”

No it isn’t: poetry has to be in the words or it is nowhere. Owen takes the high moral ground when he says his book “is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them”.

As CH Sisson commented: “This sentence about English poetry not yet being fit to speak of heroes connotes an ill-placed progressivism.

Were there grounds for thinking that the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare was taking a turn for the better, so that one day, if it continued to get good reports, it would be able to speak of matters which were above the heads of those beginners?

Might, majesty, dominion and power and other prayer book trash, none of these things is serious compared with what Wilfred is going to say.”

Mere sentimentality will not do. It is possible to write a bad poem about a serious subject - even about the First World War. Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth is one of them.

And it will come as a shock to BBC producers to learn that not all First World War poets shared the pacifist vision. Edward Thomas was an accomplished soldier and a poet but not above saying a few words:

But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God save England, lest
We lose what never slaves nor cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from dust
She is all we know and live by and we trust
She is good and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.

And on Sunday we shall recall Laurence Binyon:

They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn;
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

What these poets understood is that, though suffering and death are terrible, worse things can happen.

During the First World War, the soldierpoet TE Hulme wrote: “The pacifists’ incapacity to realise the consequences of defeat arises from a relativist, utilitarian ethic.

They live securely and comfortably, finding a sufficient support in a sceptical rationalism.

But individuals in a condition of danger, when the pseudo-absolutes melt away into a flux, require once more a real absolute to enable them to live”. In other words, war is very nasty but a dishonest peace is worse than a terrible war. Soldiers do not glory in war.

They hate it – because it is they and not the writers of anti-war editorials in the press who have to fight it.