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Location: Work.
Listening: Still Silent.

I'm posting this piece primarily as a reminder to myself not to slide into reactionary aggression--to think carefully about what courses of action I choose to support in the next few days or weeks.

This piece was originally quoted to me by my former fiance, an Arkansan who went into the Army ROTC in order to go to Harvard and who used to speak, with a gleam in his eye, of throwing himself on a grenade to save his unit. Despite my dislike of the poet's form and word choices, the poem stayed with me through the years, eventually becoming a very important factor in shaping my attitudes toward the military and war in general--though not in the ways Jay had anticipated. He saw this piece as bittersweet--a comment on a necessary tragedy suffered in the name of one's country. I see it as illustrative of the only consistent "truth" of war.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned out 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 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.

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.

For the sake of context, Wilfred Owen was a young teacher who, at the age of twenty-two, decided to enlist in the British Army in order to help his countrymen fight World War I. He chronicled his experiences at the front in his poetry and letters home until he was caught in a German machine gun attack on November 4, 1918, seven days before the signing of the Armistice. His parents were celebrating the arrival of peace when they received the telegram that their son had been killed in action. Owen was twenty-five when he died.