Dulce et decorum est

Christian Century, Feb 8, 2003 by Wilfred Owen

Dulce et decorum est

   Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
   Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
   Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
   And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
   Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
   But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
   Drank with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
   Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

   Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling,
   Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
   But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
   And flound'ring like a man in fire and lime ...
   Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
   As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

   In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
   He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

   If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
   Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
   And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
   His hanging face, like a devil's sick with sin;
   If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
   Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
   Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
   Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues--
   My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
   To children ardent for some desperate glory,
   The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
   Pro patria mori.

From The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, copyright [c] 1963 by Chatto & Windus, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

AS THE DRUMS of war beat again, it is fitting to ponder Wilfred Owen's description of his experience in World War I's trench warfare. Sickened by the cruelty and waste of war, Owen wrote some of the most powerful antiwar poems in the English language. Here he angrily responds to those who, themselves shielded from the experience of war, propagate the "old Lie" that, in the words of the Latin poet Horace, it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. To that pious phrase, Owen juxtaposes the horrifying image of a soldier he helplessly watched die during an attack of poisoned gas, a memory that haunts his dreams. There is no glory in war, the poem shows, only terrible, unjustified suffering, inflicted and experienced. We suffer differently but no less horribly in modern warfare, while the propaganda machine urges us on. Fighting for England, Owen himself was killed in France soon after completing this poem.

--Trudy Bush, associate editor