the old lie

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."
It is sweet and fitting to die for your country.
-- Vergil, the Aeneid

Dulce et Decorum est

by Wilfred Owen (1917)

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 gas-shells dropping softly 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 floundering 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.

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.

* * * * * * *

From the Imperial War Museum's exhibit of twelve soldier poets of World War One, "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (the title of one of Wilfred Owen's poems):

Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918) was born into a prosperous home in Oswestry, but two years later his family was obliged to move to a modest house in Shrewsbury and then to Birkenhead. His mother encouraged his ambitions to restore the standing of the family. From 1911 he worked as a lay assistant to an Oxfordshire vicar, but became increasingly disillusioned with the Church.

When war was declared Owen was in France, where he had been employed as a private tutor. He returned to England and joined the Artists' Rifles in October 1915. He was subsequently commissioned into the Manchester Regiment and was sent to France in December 1916. In April 1917, after a traumatic period of action, he was diagnosed as suffering from shell-shock and was sent back to Britain. At Craiglockhart War Hospital he met Siegfried Sassoon. There, with Sassoon's constructive support, he found his poetic voice, writing such poems as 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'. Owen returned to France in August 1918. He was awarded the Military Cross in October, but was killed in action on 4 November. His family received the telegram reporting his death as the Armistice bells were sounding in their home town.

Well, I feel I have to add this, so much time has passed that some readers might not know. The Armistice was the agreement finally signed between the Allied governments and the Imperial German government that ended the ghastly, monstrous, terrible, useless carnage and slaughter. The War was over. The overheated barrels of the guns fell silent and cooled, the fighting stopped, bayonets were returned to their scabbards and would no longer be soaked in another man's blood, and then extracted by a boot to the chest.

The Armistice was signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. Today it's celebrated as Armistice Day, Veterans Day, or Remembrance Day.

All the soldiers who had managed to stay alive would soon be returning home, to their sweethearts, their mothers, their sisters, their little brothers. When word of the Armistice was received back in England, Scotland, Wales, every church rang its bells for hours.