John Maesfield is not read so much today, though he was widely admired in the years before the war broke out.  This is an excerpt of his poem “August, 1914,” patriotic but not jingoistic, sorrowful and anticipating more sorrow.  It was the last poem he wrote until the war was over.

So beautiful it is, I never saw 
So great a beauty on these English fields, 
Touched by the twilight's coming into awe, 
Ripe to the soul and rich with summer's yields. 
These homes, this valley spread below me here, 
The rooks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen, 
Have been the heartfelt things, past-speaking dear 
To unknown generations of dead men, 

Who, century after century, held these farms, 
And, looking out to watch the changing sky, 
Heard, as we hear, the rumours and alarms 
Of war at hand and danger pressing nigh. 

And knew, as we know, that the message meant 
The breaking off of ties, the loss of friends, 
Death, like a miser getting in his rent, 
And no new stones laid where the trackway ends. 

The harvest not yet won, the empty bin, 
The friendly horses taken from the stalls, 
The fallow on the hill not yet brought in, 
The cracks unplastered in the leaking walls. 

Yet heard the news, and went discouraged home, 
And brooded by the fire with heavy mind, 
With such dumb loving of the Berkshire loam 
As breaks the dumb hearts of the English kind, 

Then sadly rose and left the well-loved Downs, 
And so by ship to sea, and knew no more 
The fields of home, the byres, the market towns, 
Nor the dear outline of the English shore, 

But knew the misery of the soaking trench, 
The freezing in the rigging, the despair 
In the revolting second of the wrench 
When the blind soul is flung upon the air,

And died (uncouthly, most) in foreign lands 
For some idea but dimly understood 
Of an English city never built by hands 
Which love of England prompted and made good.

You can find it all here, and here (Search August, 1914)