John Pepper Clark's poem, "The Casualties," is written, in the first two stanzas, from a third-person perspective, and in the last two stanzas from a first-person perspective. In the last two stanzas, the speaker declares, "We fall. / All casualties of the war," and he subsequently calls the war "our war." The first-person collective pronouns, "We" and "our," remind the reader that everyone is a casualty of war, even if they are not directly involved.

The poem is also written in free verse, meaning that there is no regular rhythm or rhyme. There is no rhyme scheme, no regular syllabic meter, and the stanzas are all of different lengths. This perhaps lends to the poem a sense of chaos, echoing the chaos of the wars and conflicts described.

The genre of the poem could be an elegy. The poem mourns for and laments the eponymous casualties, and there is certainly an elegiac tone to the poem. This tone is created by the frequent use of language connoting death, destruction, and violence. For example, the speaker describes "scenes of ravage and wreck" and "prisoners in / A fortress of falling walls."