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__A Channel Passage__ The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew I must think hard of something, or be sick; And could think hard of only one thing--you! You, you alone could hold my fancy ever! And with you memories come, sharp pain, and dole. Now there's a choice--heartache or tortured liver! A sea-sick body, or a you-sick soul! Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me, Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw. Do I remember? Acrid return and slimy, The sobs and slobber of a last year's woe. And still the sick ship rolls. 'Tis hard, I tell ye, To choose 'twixt love and nausea, heart and belly.
 * ​ ​Rupert Brooke**



[|**Vera Brittain**]** :describing a field camp hospital in Etaples in 1918 in her book //A Testament of Youth//. by Vera Brittain. ** The strain is very, very great. The enemy is within shelling distance - refugee sisters crowding in with nerves all awry - bright moonlight, and aeroplanes carrying machine guns - ambulance trains jolting into the siding, all day, all night - gassed men on stretchers clawing the air - dying men reeking with mud and foul green stained bandages, shrieking and writhing in a grotesque travesty of manhood - dead men with fixed empty eyes and shiny yellow faces.

Vera Brittain as a nurse once said, "I wish people who talk about going on this war whatever it costs, could see the soldiers suffering from mustard gas poisoning. Great mustard-coloured blisters, blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.