For most of human history, poems and songs about battle, combat and war were in praise of valor, courage, mighty deeds.  If death or sorrow was mentioned it was in near proximity to the former, the aura bestowing explanation and value. Not until the 18th century, in the English speaking world, did poems appear that, however modestly, simply sorrowed over loss or questioned the necessity, or human proclivity, to go to war. It was as World War I raged on that this began to change, though the beginning years offered more of the same — in ditties, and in more serious songs, nobility, necessity, uplift and patriotism.  This 1782 poem by John Scott of Amwell, 1782, is the most outspoken of the early generation of War Dubious poems

 

The Drum

    I hate that drum’s discordant sound.
    Parading round, and round, and round:
    To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields,
    And lures from cities and from fields,
    To sell their liberty for charms
    Of tawdry lace, and glittering arms;
    And when Ambition’s voice commands,
To march, and fight, and fall, in foreign lands.

    I hate that drum’s discordant sound.
    Parading round, and round, and round:
    To me it talks of ravaged plains,
    And burning town, and ruined swains,
    And mangled limbs, and dying groans,
    And widows’ tears, and orphan’s moans;
    And all that Misery’s hand bestows,
To fill the catalogue of human woes.

John Scott of Amwell, 1784

from The New Oxford Book of War Poetry,  1984/2014, edited by Jon Stallworthy

The Chinese, as in so much, had an earlier appreciation of the nefariousness of war, though not discovered by the West until much later

Nefarious War
Li Po (c 750)
Translated from the Chinese by Shigeyoshi Obata, 1922

Last year we fought by the head-stream of the So-Kan,
This year we are fighting on the Tsung-ho road.
We have washed our armor in the waves of the Chiao-chi lake,
We have pastured our horses on Tien-shan’s snowy slopes.
The long, long war goes on ten thousand miles from home.
Our three armies are worn and grown old.

The barbarian does man-slaughter for plowing;
On his yellow sand-plains nothing has been seen but blanched skulls and bones.
Where the Chin emperor built the walls against the Tartars,
There the defenders of Han are burning beacon fires.
The beacon fires burn and never go out.
There is no end to war!—

In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;
The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,
While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,
Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.
So, men are scattered and smeared over the desert grass,

And the generals have accomplished nothing.Oh, nefarious war! I see why arms
Were so seldom used by the benign sovereigns.