Jon Stallworthy wrote his first poems during schooldays shadowed by the Second World War and a mother's memories of a brother and friends killed in the First. He would go on to publish an award-winning biography of Wilfred Owen and to edit the Oxford Book of War Poetry. This book brings together the poems he has written throughout his career in response to the wars that scarred the twentieth century. The title poem, previously uncollected, sheds piercing light on the dark aftermath of the conflict so bitterly remembered today, a century on, as the war to end wars'.