The poem I reproduce below was penned by a schoolgirl, Rebecca Sullivan as a (probably rather tiresome) homework assignment.  Her subject matter was Remembrance Day: the 11th of the 11th.  To continue with the BBC News report:-

Her teacher was so moved by the poem - which describes a world in which war dead are all but forgotten - she sent it to the Royal British Legion.

Officials decided to include it in a service at Trafalgar Square after deciding that it stood out from the hundreds of poems the Legion receives each year.

Rebecca wrote her piece after being moved by the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon which she read as part of a school project.

Here then, with apologies for any excessive lugubriousness, is the poem - which I found myself forced to read from a slightly different but no less poignant perspective.

There Lie Forgotten Men

They lie there in their thousands
The last rays of sunlight
Catching the white of the gravestones
Lending a poignancy to the moment
Numbering in their thousands they lay
Deserving remembrance
And yet the scarred green fields are empty
Nothing remains here
The processions of people vanished with the years
Their sacrifice all but forgotten

She stands there alone
At the edge of the silent place
And she is shocked
New wars brew and these forgotten men
Will play no part in them
The dead silence warn no ears but hers
In great halls in moments of great decision
What they fought for is forsaken
And by days end new gravestones
Appear on the blood red ground

She finds what she seeks
‘Sgt John Malley Age 27’
His life brutally ended
And she stands by his grave
But he can give no answers
And she weeps for him
For the empty hole he left behind
And for the new emptiness
Soon to join the black chasm
And her tears join the flood