Anti-War Poet

The 1997 movie, Regeneration, (sometimes called Behind Enemy Lines), is set in a psychiatric hospital for shell-shocked and insane soldiers during WW1. It's also about two famous anti-war poets, Sigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Wilfred Owen admired Sassoon almost to the point of hero-worship, but the focus of this movie is mostly on the life of Wilfred Owen and the development of his poetry and its' encouragement by Sassoon. Owen is generally considered a greater poet than Sassoon. Owen is in the hospital for shell-shock. Sassoon is sane and brave, having received the iron cross for bravery, but because he wrote a pamphlet criticizing the war, he is hospitalized and encouraged to recant or stay in the sanitarium for the entire war. Neither Sassoon nor Owen is particularly opposed to all wars, since they both enlisted, but they feel this one is hopeless and needlessly prolonged.
We are so accustomed to people protesting against issues, that it's hard for us to really understand how controversial it was for these men to speak out against war during these times, even in free countries. This was at a time when according to Owen, the thinking was "It is great and glorious to die for one's country."
Owen, as a soldier, was not a pacifist, but he did see the horrors of war and wanted the world to wake up. He wrote about trench and gas warfare. At one point in the movie, as the men are arguing about whether they should even be fighting at all, Dr. William Rivers challenges them angrily, "And what if everyone believed like you? Do you think the Germans will just go home?"
Owen wrote a poem from the perspective of a recently killed soldier, and another where he talks to an enemy soldier, that in other circumstances, they may have had a beer together.
Sadly, Wilfred Owen was killed in the war, at age 25, one week before the armistice. The news of his death reached his hometown just as the bells where ringing in celebration of the end of the Great War.
The most poignant scene in the movie is at the end, when news of Owen's death reaches Dr. Rivers. In the letter is a poem of Owen's, which he reads aloud. It is based on the Biblical narrative of Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac.

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac, the first-born spake and said, 'My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt offering?'
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son,
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by it's horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

You can also google Wilfred Owen, and hear his poems narrated to music and pictures. The above poem is very powerful heard this way.