War poet's last post of hope from a tiny cellar

The cellar window with its poppy and cross commemorating Owen.

ORS - A beam of light stabs the darkness and with it comes a jolt down the spine caused not by the deep chill of northern France in January but a sense that here, in this tiny brick cellar, is a direct connection with a moment in history.

There are surely ghosts in this place.

It was here, in the curved-roofed basement of a forester's house, as shells crumped and crashed in the distance and his candle guttered in the smoke, that a young man wrote to his mother for what would be the last time.

The date was October 31, 1918, and the author was the poet Wilfred Owen. After more than four years of trench warfare, only a few days of fighting were left. The Germans were falling back, although putting up a stiff rearguard defence, and the Allies were in hot pursuit.

Owen describes the scene in the crammed cellar as his unit cavort around. They are in high spirits, swapping rations, telling jokes and boiling up spuds for a meal, daring at last to believe that they will miraculously survive the butchery.

"I hope you are as warm as I am; as serene in your room as I am here," the young lieutenant says, his attempt to reassure so telling of that bond between mother and son. "Of this I am certain, you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here. There is no danger down here or if any, it will be well over before you read these lines."

Little more than four days later, Owen was killed as he and his men came under machinegun fire trying to cross the Sambre-Oise canal, just a kilometre away. His mother opened the War Office telegram informing her of his death on November 11 - just as church bells in her home in Shrewsbury were ringing out to celebrate the Armistice.

Nearly 90 years on, Owen's poems are more popular than ever, and just as relevant. He and his fellow war poets, such as Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke, have a passionate following. Their condemnation of war is a universal message spanning time, cultures and language.

Now thanks to a French village mayor who became captivated by Owen's verse, the cellar where the young poet neared his death is set to open to the world, providing a unique meeting point of the poetry of war. The scheme is the brainchild of Jacky Duminy, a now-retired railway worker who, as mayor of the 1000 souls of Ors, knew nothing about Owen until 1991.

"We had a stream of occasional visitors to the Commonwealth War Cemetery in the village, but we didn't know why. Then one day, someone from the Western Front Association told me that we had a famous poet called Wilfred Owen who was buried there. Owen? I had never heard of him."