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GCSE English Literature: War Poems Compare two poems from the selection which make you feel sympathy for the people involved in war. Which do you find more effective? “Do they matter? -those dreams from the pit? ... You can drink and forget and be glad, And people won’t say that you’re mad…” Siegfried Sassoon, “Does it matter?” August 1914, Britain declares war on Germany and the First World War begins. A war that brings about the deaths of millions of men, the destruction of land to a scale unseen before, and after four years of fighting, the war ends, the reasons as to why it happened still baffles all, yet the effects it had on people were so shockingly clear, yet very few people could absorb it, or even accept it ever happened. Most people in Britain welcomed the start of the war. The feelings of excitement, patriotism, and a sense of duty and the romantic ideas of what war would be like persuaded many to join. People were constantly fed propaganda about what war is like and how it will affect a person, while the true effects were only discovered on the battlefield by soldiers who never came back. For those who came back with severe injuries the trauma was not over. They came back only to find that