The Road to Ruin by Siegfried Sassoon

Sassoon seems to one of the less-well-known of the war poets, at least nowadays (which makes me want to read him more).

The Road to Ruin is a poem published in 1933. In it Sassoon visualises what might happen over the next 10 years. His nightmare vision is obviously concerned about war coming again, but it is written in the vocabulary of the First World War, with London succumbing to gas. It's ironic that the next war was to end with a weapon more terrible than he was able to imagine.

Day 293; Book 283

Cock-a-Doodle Doo by Robert S McLeish

This is "a Scots comedy in one act" published in 1990 but set before the First World War. It's an amusing farce and looks as if there would be plenty of laughs if you saw it performed. The dialect is consistent but it looks like Glaswegian to me - still maybe the farm where it's set was near Glasgow ...

Day 293; Book 282