Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
"It is sweet and fitting to die for
your country."
Horace, Odes
(III.2.13)
Vivid memories of words, pictures and emotions haunt me over
thirty years later. High school English, my senior year and Mr. Howell is
perched on the front corner of his desk. He’s using poetry to paint
traumatizing portraits of the ironically mislabeled ‘war to end all wars.’ Words
become pictures—teenage soldiers ‘floundering’ and ‘fumbling’ in the muddy,
bloody trenches of the Second Battle of Ypres. They’re devising makeshift masks
of urine-soaked rags against the apocalyptic horror of mustard gas attacks. Mr.
Howell, now weeping, recites an excerpt from William Owen’s poem, 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;
Drunk 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 or 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 ...
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;
Drunk 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 or 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 ...
Dulce
et Decorum Est? Sweet and
fitting? Owen goes on to bitterly describe the convulsive gargling of
‘froth-corrupted lungs’ and says NO! Participants in ‘the Great War’ would
never recount such a lie to children who dream of doing or being something
glorious.
The Greek poet, Horace, who coined
the phrase, had never seen chemical warfare. Neither had we until network news
brought us images from Syria last year—hundreds of civilians, including
children, wrapped in death shrouds awaiting burial. Barbaric. Inhuman. But
remember who it was that first invented and employed gas attacks: supposedly
‘Christian’ nations at the height of industrial civilization, mutually
destroying one another in the greatest human disaster since the Black Death
(1348-50). Nine million dead before all is said and done.
Wilfred
Owen knew the futility of war. Like Mr. Howell, an English teacher by
profession, Owen enlisted after visiting wounded soldiers in a hospital. He
fought for two years, was injured, but then returned to the front. Three months
later, on Nov. 4, 1918, he died in a machine gun attack, exactly one week
before the war ended.
