Wilfred Owen on the Horror of War

Today marks the hundredth anniversary of the end of the first world war, and of the armistice that took place, in the mournful phrase seemingly designed for generations of sonorous broadcasters, “on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.”

It sent me back to re-read Wilfred Owen, the British poet who died a hundred years ago this past Sunday, and particularly to the poem where he asks the reader to join him as he watches through the panes of his gas mask as another soldier who did not get his mask on slowly dies:

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 of 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.

Owen’s message is the same message almost every soldier unlucky enough to experience war and lucky enough to survive it brings home to whoever will listen:  Honor the dead. But do not glorify this horror.