Century: Never Such Innocence Again

Meath poet Francis Ledwidge accurately predicted the posthumous fate (until so very recently) of the thousands of Irishmen who died in the first World War

Guillaume Apollinaire, France’s most acclaimed war poet, who was born in Rome to a Polish noblewoman, survived the trenches of the first World War only to be killed by Spanish flu at the age of 38

The evolution of modernist literature was intimately bound up with the shock and devastation of the war

‘We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation . . . ’ Erich Maria Remarque’s unmatchable anti-war novel was a literary sensation in pre-Nazi Germany

There is no convenient canon of Irish war literature, like that which appeared in Britain, even though Ireland had three towering literary figures in Shaw, Yeats and Joyce at the time, working at the pinnacles of poetry, prose and drama