Death, war, and writing about death in war (4)
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;
nk 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 flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
rough 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.
If Tennyson seeks to turn a futile, devastating military campaign into the glorification of soldiers’ bravery and group focus, Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et decorum est is a relentless and harsh critique of the degrading, damaging, and sickening reality of war. The battlefield, especially the battlefields of World War One, Owen asserts, prohibit a soldier from dying a ‘good death’, for there is nothing good about the trenches.
The poem, published after the end of the war in 1921, opens with a visceral description of the physical baggage of being a soldier in trench warfare. The men are ‘Bent double, like old beggars under sacks’, and Owen rhymes ‘sludge’ with ‘trudge’ to emphasise the grimy, unforgiving environment of the trenches. In the second stanza, Owen witnesses a man die as a result of chemical warfare:
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.
There is nothing that is good about this man’s death. There is no purpose, no aesthetic beauty or glory, no nobility of spirit. Instead, ‘flound’ring’, the man is helpless; ‘As under a green sea’ he is utterly displaced: ‘He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.’ The unnamed soldier’s death is characterised with pain, meaninglessness, and a loss of control.
The trauma of witnessing this death is ongoing and pervasive: ‘In all my dreams before my helpless sight’ the poet sees this man’s death. Death in war, the poet suggests, is never one-time only; it is a repeated injury on those who witnessed that individual’s fall; and being made a witness to such a painful and futile death renders the viewer ‘helpless’. But it is not a helplessness that leaves Owen silent. Rather, his is the angry resistance of a soldier who denies the glory of a battlefield, who resents the equation of patriotic duty and military death as a formula resulting in personal glory. He turns his poem into a plea to all people holding any position of authority, political or social, to end the perpetuation of the equation of patriotic duty with a noble death. Instead, Owen rejects as ‘The old Lie’ Horace’s claim that it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country, the capitalisation of ‘Lie’ suggesting that Horace’s sentiment is so dangerous because it has become an archetype. ‘For Queen and country’, we might say now, to which Wilfred Owen might tell us, don’t believe that. It is never worth it, and it never was.
Posted:
Categories: Reflections