AS a founder-member of the F W Harvey Society, I cannot be anything but pleased to see there is an evening in Yorkley Institute this Saturday dedicated to our local poet's contribution to the legacy of the First World War and his consequent responses to armed conflict.

Harvey was, of course, a proud veteran and a regular attendee and participant in Remembrance Day events at Yorkley cenotaph. But perhaps we should not assume from this that he approved of the Great War or of warfare in general.

He himself, we are told by Dr Bill Tandy, his doctor in the 1940s and 50s, was a "war casualty". The frequent bouts of depression (and his turning to alcoholic escape) witnessed by his Forest friends were a result of his experiences in Flanders and the prison-camps he endured.

His poetry written when he lived in Yorkley (as he did for the last 30 years of his life) reveals more of his thoughts.

In the 1930s Harvey had initiated with Whitecroft Male Voice Choir the annual Devil's Chapel open-air concert, with the aim not just of creating a unique communal cultural event but of exorcising the site of these ancient iron workings, for Harvey could only think of the fact that the iron mined here went to make swords and spears and armaments. He recorded his anguish in the remarkable poem Devil's Chapel, where he suggests that as an ex-soldier who had killed others in the Great War, he clearly wanted absolution for himself and for the guilt of the antecedents of Forest miners who had slaved here to produce the metal that made warfare possible.

Asked in September 1945 by The Forester's predecessor, the Forest of Dean Newspapers, to write a celebration of the end of World War Two, Harvey submitted a short poem, Victory, that was not about the Allies' success but about his personal victory in defeating his own war-induced internal demons, disassociating himself from the war against Germany.

This is not to diminish the memory of those who died in wars, nearly always not as heroes but victims, but to appreciate that Remembrance is about reminding ourselves of the fatalities and consequences of war and not about celebrating the so-say heroism and tragedies of it. FW Harvey knew this well.

David Adams

Yorkley