“Sweet and proper it is, to die for one’s country.”
Horace, Odes
As the church bells rang on Armistice Day, Wilfred Owen’s mother received the news that he had died almost to the hour a week before.
Owen, like his German counterpart Erich Maria Remarque, wrote starkly of the horrors of war. His best-known piece is “Dulce et Decorum est”:
If in smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind this 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 end
Of vile, incurable sore 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 Patri mori.
The title was taken from a line in one of Horace’s “Odes.” Here’s the relevant passage from the original (John Conington translation):
| Angustam amice pauperiem pati robustus acri militia puer condiscat et Parthos ferocis vexet eques metuendus hasta vitamque sub divo et trepidis agat in rebus. Illum ex moenibus hosticis matrona bellantis tyranni prospiciens et adulta virgo suspiret, eheu, ne rudis agminum sponsus lacessat regius asperum tactu leonem, quem cruenta per medias rapit ira caedes. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: mors et fugacem persequitur virum nec parcit inbellis iuventae poplitibus timidove tergo. |
To suffer hardness with good cheer, In sternest school of warfare bred, Our youth should learn; let steed and spear Make him one day the Parthian’s dread; Cold skies, keen perils, brace his life. Methinks I see from rampired town Some battling tyrant’s matron wife, Some maiden, look in terror down,— “Ah, my dear lord, untrain’d in war! O tempt not the infuriate mood Of that fell lion I see! from far He plunges through a tide of blood!” What joy, for fatherland to die! Death’s darts e’en flying feet o’ertake, Nor spare a recreant chivalry, A back that cowers, or loins that quake. |
Thus the myths of war are perpetuated on the graves of “children ardent for some desperate glory.”
Now they have it.
Their glory returned, but not them.
Dulce et decorum est….
Iconoclast 