Blow out you Bugles - a musical free setting by Sue Casson of part of Rupert Brooke's War Sonnet III frames David Maxwell Fyfe's account of his meeting with America's Justice Jackson, (whose voice can be heard on an archive recording) to decide what to do with the major war criminals after World War II.

 

Brooke's War Sonnet III ends with the word ‘heritage’, echoed by David Maxwell Fyfe in his closing speech at Nuremberg when he talks of rights for all as ‘the inalienable heritage of mankind.’

 

Brooke was writing about the First World War, but these lines take on a further resonance in a story telling how human rights evolved into law after the Second. The sound of the bugles blowing over the battlefield dead echo on in a musical herald to an unprecendented trial seeking to impose meaning on the waste of life; bringing gold out of the base metal and carnage of WWII – restoring Honour and Order to Chaos.