In an interview on War Crimes

Your next choice is The Poems of Wilfred Owen.

This is a book that was bought for me in 1997 by my wife on our second Christmas together. She knew that I loved his poetry. I have loved this poetry since I was a child because my grandfather was a First World War veteran and my father wanted to try and understand what he went through. So my father read them and when I was a child I would look at the book as well. And then at school my headmaster liked Wilfred Owen a lot too

Owen was killed in the last month of the war as a young lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment. If you look at his face (there is a photo of him on the front of this book), you will see it is a very sensitive face. I think he found war terrifying and emotionally draining and in many respects he wrote poetry to try and explain some of the things that he was seeing.

I will just read you three lines from the preface to his book which he wrote in May of 1918. 

    Above all I am not concerned with poetry. 

    My subject is war and the pity of war. 

    And the poetry is in the pity.

And, actually, what he really does address in all of his poems about the First World War is the utter pity of it all.

You’ve been to places like Bosnia, Darfur and Cambodia. Do you still see parallels with Owen’s comments on pity there?

Yes, absolutely. You know, what I see is that he was constantly addressing the utter, utter stupidity of warfare and certainly the amount of human damage that lies in the wake of all of these events, whether it’s Darfur, Bosnia or Cambodia. He was addressing the catastrophic human effect – wasted lives, young people being forced to fight an absolutely appalling war and often losing their lives and the effect that it has on generations. You have got to remember that an entire generation of people were wiped out in the First World War. So, yes, I do see parallels and I do see the effects on society in places like Cambodia.

In an interview on Reportage and War

Why have you included this collection of war poems?

It may seem odd. You may ask what war poems have got to do with reportage. But in this case they have a lot. There are not many poems by Owen as he died so young. He died venerably in his early twenties the Sunday before the armistice in 1918. But he wrote so vividly of war. I think he’s the most influential writer in English in the whole of the 20th century. This body of work shows you the reality of war. And I think before 1914, the British people tended to take a Boy’s Own Paper view of warfare – it was a glorious enterprise, medals were to be won, you tested yourself and so on. When the reality of life in the trenches, which Owen describes so vividly, became known, the view of war as a terrible waste of time and lives entered the national bloodstream and it really stayed there until the end of the century because it was reinforced by the dreadful events of the Second World War. Only in the late 1990s did you get a generation of British politicians coming to power who had no experience of that and they then tended to embark on the types of military adventures that we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan and so on.

I had a battered edition I used to carry around with me. Owen speaks to me about the reality of warfare more than any other book about war.

The works of the war poets seem incredibly enduring, and are as popular now as they have ever been. Why do you think that is?

It’s nearly a hundred years since the beginning of the Great War but that body of work endures. And I think that our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, whatever these are or were, they will not be victories. And the bodies coming home, the Wootton Bassett effect if you like [after the English town where military processions were held], has drawn us back to the work of the likes of [Siegfried] Sassoon and Owen and we question the rationale for going to war, we question whether warfare is in itself a glorious enterprise. This book in particular, his Anthem for Doomed Youth and the others, stand as monuments, in my mind, to the reality of warfare. Everything I have seen on the world’s battlefields I have seen through that light.

Do you have a favourite?

Yes. My favourite is Anthem for Doomed Youth.

“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.”