“They”
	by Siegfried Sassoon
The Bishop tells us: “When the boys come back
They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought
In a just cause: they lead the last attack
On Anti-Christ; their comrades’ blood has bought
New right to breed an honourable race,	5
They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.”
“We’re none of us the same!” the boys reply.
“For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;
Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;
And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find	10
A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.”
And the Bishop said: “The ways of God are strange!”
Bishop — presumably either an Anglican or an Anglo-Catholic bishop. Anglicanism, a form of Protestantism, is the state religion of the United Kingdom.  Anglo-Catholicism is a more conservative sect, which can be thought of either as a Protestant religion that has adopted much of Catholic liturgy, or as a basically Catholic sect that does not acknowledge papal authority. Sassoon’s mother was Anglo-Catholic; his father, who died when Sassoon was a boy of ten or eleven, was descended from one of the oldest, richest, and most powerful Jewish families in the world, but was disinherited when he married outside his faith.