"Dulce et Decorum Est", Wilfred Owen

There is no doubt that the most famous soldier poet of the First World War is Wilfred Owen. A close friend of another poet fighting in the trenches in France, Siegfried Sassoon, whom he met in 1916 during a stay in hospital in Scotland recovering from wounds sustained during combat, Owen recounted through his poems his experiences as a second lieutenant in the Great War.

Owen’s most famous poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est” paints a grim picture of fighting in the trenches, and especially the consequences of a gas attack. The soldiers described at the beginning are seen as heavily affected by their time in France:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge

…

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue;

Such are the hardships that they have endured, that they can barely walk back to their base. Suddenly, a gas attack takes place and the soldiers scramble to put on their gas masks:

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time

But one soldier is not quick enough, and the poet witnesses as he slowly succumbs to the terrible effects of the gas: “As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.”

From that moment, Owen continually relives the scene in his nightmares, unable to forget the agonies suffered by that soldier:

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

There follow vivid descriptions of the man’s slow and painful death with “His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin”, whilst the gas burns into his body so that blood “Comes gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”. The poet’s intention in insisting on this terrible end that the soldier suffers becomes clear towards the end of the poem. As the title suggests, Owen is referring to a famous quotation from the Roman poet Horace, who once wrote of how, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”: “It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country”. But for the poet, there is no such honour to be found in the violence and suffering of the trenches in northern France, and this statement is nothing more than an “old Lie”.

Owen himself was shot and killed in Ors on 4th November 1918, just one week from the Armistice, whilst trying to cross the Sambre canal with his men. As was mentioned above, he had already been wounded earlier in the war, and had been shipped back to Britain to recover. But he had actively chosen to come back and continue the fighting with his men as soon as he was fit enough.