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To mark the death of WW1 veterans Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, this morning Radio 4's Today programme broadcast a poem commissioned from new Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

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In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud…
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home-
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce- No- Decorum- No- Pro patria mori.
You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too-
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert-
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly write it backwards,
then it would.

(This text will be removed as soon as it is no longer freely available via the BBC website.)

Victoria and Albert Toft

Splendid surprise this morning to see that Leamington's statue of Queen Victoria has been scrubbed to dazzling whiteness. Hurrah!

The monumental figure of the Queen Empress is the work of Albert Toft, a Midlands-born artist who seems to have specialised in memorials.

Just down the street is another Toft figure, a lone rifleman, atop the town's war memorial.

One of his biggest commissions was to create the four large bronze figures that circle Birmingham's principal war memorial, the Hall of Memory.

Very much of their time, the impressively idealised figures represent in turn the Army (above), Navy, Air Force and Women's Services.

I'm intrigued that so many of the memorials created in the aftermath of WW1 are deliberately, one mights say emphatically, secular in character.

Back to Leamington. A plaque reveals the Queen Victoria was stirred, but not shaken, by the air raid of 14 November 1940.

On the same night, the raid on nearby Coventry continued for ten hours, causing massive destruction and taking the lives of 568 civilians.

Frozen moment....

Occasionally, when one is browsing through old photographs, time 'telescopes' and suddenly the distant past seems, well, not distant at all....

This picture shows a PE class at Topsham Barracks, Devon. Dated 28 January 1916.

My grandfather Harry Rowe is one of the two instructors - he's sitting cross-legged.

One wonders how many of them got through to the end of that year unscathed, let alone to Armistice Day 1918.

The lad third from right, back row, looks about sixteen. He should be at school.