Armistice Day

I came across this poem while looking for sanity amongst the remembrance day jingoism. It is by Wilfred Owen and I believe is called "Dulce et Decorum est"

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.


Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori translates to "It is sweet and glorious to die for one's country"

This is a classic poem, the opposite of "Flanders Field"'s syrupy sentimental plea to continue the industrial-scale murder ("Take up our quarrel with the foe!").

You left out the first part, through. The first part has some of the most memorable parts like 'Gas! GAS! Quick boys' and 'An ecstasy of fumbling' (a phrasing that makes we wonder if it inspired Sarah Sarah McLachlan's album title "Fumbling toward Ecstasy").  Also the chillingly oceanic description: "Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning."


Dulce et decorum est

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,
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.

Going through some analysis of the poem I found that there is some 'Dulce et decorum est' backlash. The poem was taught in British schools since the 1960s and some Imperialists feel that it is too anti-war and was chosen by Leftist to include in the curriculum because of this.  

BBC Imperial Poet wrote:Has poetry distorted our view of World War One? Have we made a schoolboy error?

A select group of well-educated soldier officers, including Wilfred Owen, came to view the war as one of pity and horror. This was a minority view but expressed through powerful and well-written poetry. In the 1960s a literary elite decided this was the most authentic view of the conflict because it chimed with their own anti-war feelings.

We've seen that relying on a small canon of poems gives us a very narrow view of both war poetry and the feelings and thoughts of people who lived through the conflict. Historians have realised this and long since moved away from a 1960s mindset. However, many of us are still stuck with this skewed view of the war because we still learn about it through a handful of poets in English class. Is it time for this to change?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/z38rq6f

One of the complaints is that Owen's poem does not include the female experience of the war, specifically that there were many pro-war poems written by women, and they could replace Owen's  'Dulce et decorum est' as a standard WWI poem.

BBC wrote:A quarter of poems published during World War One were by women compared to a fifth written by soldiers. Their poetry reveals how women participated during the war - working and debating, suffering and sacrificing. In the song We're The Girls From Arsenal they sang: “Some people style us ‘canaries’/ But we’re working for the lads across the sea/ If it were not for the munition lassies/ Where would the Empire be?”

These lyrics show strong self-belief that they were making a difference - which indeed they were. They also reveal again the important connection felt between women at home and men on the front.

The BBC poet's use of 'Imperial Feminism' (I made this word up but it describes a real phenomena) to club the anti-war Owen is interesting, especially considering the background of  'Dulce et decorum est'.

Wikipedia wrote:Owen wrote the poem while convalescing at Craiglockhart,  The earliest surviving manuscript is dated 8 October 1917 and addressed to his mother, Susan Owen, with the message "Here is a gas poem done yesterday (which is not private, but not final)."

The first draft of the poem, indeed, was dedicated to Jessie Pope, a civilian propagandist of World War I, who encouraged—"with such high zest"—young men to join the battle, through her poetry, e.g. "Who's for the game?".

Pope's war poetry was originally published in right-wing The Daily Mail; it encouraged enlistment and handed a white feather to youths who would not join the colours. Nowadays, this poetry is considered to be jingoistic, consisting of simple rhythms and rhyme schemes, with extensive use of rhetorical questions to persuade (and sometimes pressure) young men to join the war.

You can actually see the crossed-out dedication to Jessie Pope on the draft of the poem I posted above!

The fact that a BBC poet is unironically using a 'Imperial Feminist' poem to attack Wilfred Owen's own poem attacking 'Imperial Feminist' poetry is almost breath-taking in its ignorance. I heartily agree there is far more to WWI than a chlorine gas attack and more than just the battlefront - but using gender politics to force in pro-war sentiment is ridiculous. Don't blame Owen's front-line poetry or the "1960s" anti-war morality for making WWI seem like a grim slaughter-house, blame reality.

There must be many poems written by women, non-combatant soldiers, those on the home-front, pacifists, socialists that could take their place alongside Owen's. And by all means include fascists, imperialists and futurists glorying in the joy of war. But let's keep the 'anti-war' sentiment central.

If it were not for the munition lassies
Where would the Empire be?

I don't know but it wouldn't be standing on a pile of corpses in some foreign country...

I didn't know there was a beginning to that poem!  I had come across it in an article I was reading here.  I thought the part I posted was it and it was powerful as it stood but seeing the whole poem together makes it an even stronger image.

Remembrance Day or better yet Armistice Day yet again failed to address peace in my mind, which I believe it should be 99% about.  We should remember the people who died in imperialist wars but we should understand why they died and how we can make sure it never happens again. We should talk about the fact that soldiers make up only a small percent of the casualties in war. There is a great quote from M.A.S.H that I think summarizes it well.  


Hawkeye: War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.

Father Mulcahy: How do you figure, Hawkeye?

Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?

Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.

Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.


I find it depressing to see people worship our war dead and glorify them and war as being heroic or brave, especially as we are currently living in an extremely volatile time. Especially as daily, civilians die in foreign lands in the name of our country.

We need a strong anti war movement again.

To summarize my last class:

Any Remembrance Day ceremony that does not explictly state that any war not authorized by the UN Security Council is a CRIMINAL WAR is a corrupt ritual that betrays the dead veterans it claims to honor. The capstone of WWI/II was the creation of a international ban on aggressive war as forged in 1945's Nuremberg's Tribunal and the formation of the UN.

We live in lawless era for wars. The Western powers seem to invade, bomb and occupy small countries on a whim. To promote the honoring of dead soldiers without noting the current criminality of the wars is to betray them. Here is a chart I made to illustrate this:

I wrote:   Post-WWII Global Conflicts

Korea (1950-53) Semi-legal (Russia abstained from Security Council vote)
Vietnam (1955-1975)* Criminal War (US-led)
Iraq (1991)   Semi-legal (China abstained from Security Council vote)
Yugoslavia (1995 / 1999) Criminal War (NATO-led)
Afghanistan (2001+) Criminal War (US-led / NATO terms invoked)
Iraq (2003-2011)* Criminal War (US-led)
Libya (2011) Semi- > Criminal (Russia abstained / Exceeded UN Terms)
Iraq/Syria (2014+) Criminal War (US-led NATO forces)
             * No official Canadian military involvement

The crazy part is that the brutality of the Korean War was actually one of the few semi-legal wars we've had. My chart shows that criminal wars did not begin with 9-11 but that date does mark the abandonment of Canadian UN peace-keeping missions.

I asked my class how many of them had heard the phrase 'Never Again' associated with Remembrance Day. No one had. That idea has been fed into the Memory Hole and replaced with talk about 'warriors' and pseudo-Christian 'ultimate sacrifices'.  There is an unofficial RCMP document I have that looks into the root causes of WWI and the prime cause they find is that nations of that era accepted war as legitimate way to resolve their differences. This is what has to be changed.

"The charges in the Indictment are that the defendants planned and waged aggressive wars are charges of the utmost gravity. War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world.
To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole"
  Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials (1945)