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Two hundred names are inscribed in a totemic list that opens Alice Oswald’s Memorial The deaths of the Greek heroes, recounted over 400 pages in the Iliad, are stunningly compressed across four double pages Their deaths are a foregone conclusion; but their capitalised names, framed by the blankness of the page, carry the hefty weight of each man’s life The second part of the poem, which recounts the heroes’ often unheroic traits, lays bare the insanity of war; the blind momentum that turns a man into ‘a terrible numbness / Turned inside-out and taking over everything’ In the Homeric myth, war is second nature, a duty assumed by the warrior, undeterred by the destruction reaped Soldiers ‘hurried to darkness’, race into the arms of death, the noble seal of defending one’s country For Simone Weil, writing on the eve of the Second World War, there was no terrible beauty to be born of combat War, that supposed leveller of class and race, is seen as a systematic machine that levels interiority and petrifies everyone in its midst In Oswald’s poem each forsaken soldier is given their due, which is to say, their doomed leave-taking In the Greek myths death is the unflinching end, the future for the soldier born under its sign The Greeks conducted wars, Weil writes, as ‘geometricians of virtue We are only geometricians of matter,’ or as Marco Roth writes in a recent essay, ‘drone philosophers’   In modern times, peace is seen as the ultimate, if unrealistic, goal; warfare is, if inescapable, an aberration Just as the notion of heroism died a collective death in the wake of that grand misnomer, the Great War, the horror of combat has become such a worn truism that it seems to carry little more traction that the jarring jingoism of Glory, Sacrifice and Patriotism excoriated by the First World War poets who saw that the unknown soldier would reap ‘no dividends from time’s tomorrow’ There had been military catastrophes in the past – the Charge of the Light Brigade – but these were seen as indictments of military strategy, rather than a