Robert Nichols on the Western Front

During the First World War Robert Nichols was regarded as one of the most important soldier poets of his embattled generation. E. B. Osborn's anthology The Muse in Arms (1917) featured more poems by him than by any other writer and his collection Ardours and Endurances received a long and complimentary review in The Times Literary Supplement. He experienced many of the discomforts of military life, and the pervasive sense of malaise that, for many people, was the inescapable concomitant of the war: but he was in no sense a frontline soldier poet in the sense that Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, or Wilfred Owen were.