Rhymes of a Red Cross Man

These are not poems for the faint of heart. Robert W. Service wrote them in the mud of the Western Front, between ambulance runs and the screams of the wounded. As a Red Cross volunteer driving an ammunition wagon through hell itself, he saw what poets should not see, and he wrote about it in language that hits like a fist. The collection captures the brutal truth of WWI: the terror, yes, but also the dark humor soldiers used to survive, the fierce love between men in the trenches, and the grinding absurdity of it all. Service has a voice like no other poet of his era - rough, accessible, sometimes funny, often devastating. He writes about war the way soldiers actually talked about it, not as some grand crusade but as something ugly and human and impossibly real. This is the poetry of a man who was there, and it never looks away.