How do the war poems "Fragment" by Rupert Brooke, "Anthem for Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen, and "They" by Siegfried Sassoon reflect characteristics of modern poetry? How is war represented differently from traditional poetry? What are the existing assumptions about war, and how do the poems challenge them? Is there honor and glory? Consider how Brooke, Sassoon, and Owen may be described as giving the soldiers a voice. Explain all of these points for all 3 poems.

"Fragment" is an interesting poem to have selected for Brooke, as he is usually remembered for the sonnet "The Soldier"—whose message is quite different from that of "Fragment." In "Fragment," the poem's unusual perspective invites us to consider soldiers on their journey to war as not being part of something, but as being removed from it: the final line of the first stanza—"No one could see me"—foreshadows the last stanza, in which the speaker contemplates how they may soon all become "strange ghosts."
Brooke never saw active duty, dying instead on a ship while en route to the Dardanelles. This poem captures a soldier's mood as he travels into the unknown, and there is none of the bombast or longing for glory that might be expected. Instead, the poem suggests that "this gay machine of splendour" will not survive contact with reality and instead will be "broken, / Thought little of, pashed, scattered."
The idea of being "thought little of" is one which preoccupies the speaker in this poem. If Brooke is giving voice to soldiers, it is because he fears that as soon as they leave England, these men become "like ghosts" to those at home, irrespective of whether they are still living or dead. The speaker is not necessarily afraid of dying, but he certainly seems to fear being forgotten; the real world is merely "coloured shadows," separated from him as if behind glass, while the soldiers become "strange ghosts—soon to die / To other ghosts." The suggestion is that instead of being remembered in glory and honor, the "splendour" of the soldiers heading to war will soon fade from the memory of those whose lives will go on without them at home.
"Anthem for Doomed Youth" presents a different picture of war from the perspective of an active soldier. Owen saw prolonged duty in the trenches, and the war he depicts is more brutal and honest than was typical of earlier war poetry, even from the very title. Interestingly, Owen's original title for the poem was "Anthem for Dead Youth." "Doomed" was substituted by Owen's friend and mentor, Siegfried Sassoon, and the change serves to ensure that the poem encapsulates both the living and the dead, who would never be the same after their war service.
These soldiers "die as cattle," "the shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells" a mockery of the voices of those mourning for them at home. Far from dying gloriously, the men are reduced to animals before the "stuttering rifles' rapid rattle," their deaths too fast and too numerous to be properly marked by "passing bells." Owen enumerates the trappings of a peacetime funeral—"bells," "choirs," "flowers"—as if to emphasize how abnormal the death of the young is on this scale, in which all these trappings are denied to them.
Unlike in Brooke's poem, Owen's poem does not suggest that those at home will not remember their dead. On the contrary, it implies that for these soldiers, the memories of their loved ones will be all that remains of them, "their flowers the tenderness of patient minds" and the "pallor of girls' brows," or the sadness of their sweethearts, "their pall." As one of the "doomed youth" himself, Owen's poem speaks for those who must face the "monstrous anger of the guns" everyday while knowing that those at home still feel war to be a faraway and noble endeavor, rather than something brutal, bloody and ultimately wasteful.
Sassoon's "They" is very different in tone and style to Brooke's and Owen's poems discussed above, but it conveys some similar elements to both of them. Its deliberately upbeat, whimsical meter and ABABCC rhyme scheme are satirical, reflecting the trite words of those who, like the Bishop in the poem, address the war with such platitudes as "They have challenged death and dared him face to face." In this poem, the preexisting attitudes about war, which Sassoon is criticizing, are voiced by the Bishop, who represents those at home who do not understand. His language contains oft-repeated phrases, such as "just cause," "an honourable race," and "when the boys come back," symbolizing that he does not really think about what he is saying but simply repeats these assumptions.
In the second stanza, the soldiers—described by the Bishop and by the title simply as "They," as though they were an amorphous mass rather than a group of individuals—are offered a voice. They enumerate the many brutalities war has dealt them: "lost both legs," "stone blind," and "shot through the lungs." The comment "Bert's gone syphilitic" is a particularly daring reference from Sassoon and forces the Bishop to confront the reality that war is not glorious or brave, but often dirty and sordid, as well as violent and deadly. But the Bishop does not care to listen to the evidence of those who have seen war. Instead, he simply says, "The ways of God are strange!" In this poem, Sassoon is expressing his frustrations at the refusal of those at home to acknowledge, or even properly discuss, the realities of the war. Like Brooke's soldier, he feels a palpable distance between himself as a soldier and those at home: soldiers are "they," a distinct group whose thoughts and feelings need not really be listened to by others. Sassoon is criticizing the tendency of those who have not experienced war to describe it in oblique and insufficient terms, not realizing how unsupportive this is for those who have fought.