Can a poet capture war experience? Here is Wilfred Owen:

The Sentry

We’d found an old Boche dug out, and he knew
And gave us hell: for shell on frantic shell
Lit full on top, but never quite burst through.
Rain guttering down in waterfalls of slime,
Kept slush waist-high and rising hour by hour,
And choked the steps too thick with clay to climb.
What mark of air remained stank old, and sour
With fumes from whizbangs, and the smell of men
Who’d lived there years, and left their curse in the den,
If not their corpses …
                                       There we herded from the blast
Of whizbangs; but one found our door at last, -
And thud! flump! thud! down the steps came thumping
And splashing in the flood, deluging muck,
The sentry’s body; then his rifle, handles
Of old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck.
We dredged it up for dead, until he whined
‘O sir – my eyes, I’m blind, - I’m blind,   I’m blind.
Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids
And said if he could see the least blurred light
He was not blind; in time they’d get all right.
I can’t he sobbed.  Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids
Watch my dreams still, - yet I forgot him there
In posting Next for duty, and sending a scout
To beg a stretcher somewhere, and floundering about
To other posts under the shrieking air
                                     ***
Those other wretches, how they bled and spewed,
And no one would have drowned himself for good.
I try not to remember those things now,
Half listening to the sentry’s moans and jumps,
And the wild chattering of his shivered teeth,
Renewed most horribly whenever crumps
Pummelled the roof and slogged the air beneath,
Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout
‘I see your lights!’  But ours had long gone out.

Wilfred Owen (Mar. 18, 1893 – Nov. 4, 1918)

Source: Jon Silken, ed., The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, 2^nd ed., (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 208-209.