Reply #95: Interesting stuff I posted about Wilfred Owen [View All]

[IndianaGreen]

Vera Brittain wrote about the men and women of her generation, an idealistic generation, damaged and torn asunder by the horrors of World War I. She lost her fiancée, her brother, and many of her friends to what was then called ‘The Great War.’ In her poignant 1933 memoir Testament of Youth, she described the human carnage she witnessed during the 1917 Battle of Cambrai while serving as a nurse at a military hospital near the front:

I wish those people who write so gibley about this being a holy War, and the orators who talk so much about going on no matter how long the War lasts and what it may mean, could see a case-to say nothing of 10 cases-of mustard gas in its early stages-could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes-sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently-all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breadth, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.

One of the most powerful poems to come out of World War I was Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est. Owen, an infantryman in the British army, bitterly noted how the carnage he had witnessed ran counter to the “old lie,” that dying for one’s country was sweet and proper.

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.

Wilfred Owen died in a gas attack two weeks before WWI ended.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/IndianaGreen/107

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