hen World War I broke out, the English saw going off
to battle as a fine thing to do. They embraced the Latin poet Horace's
dictum, "Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori" — It is sweet and proper
to die for one's country. But four years later, that romantic notion had
been shattered by the grim reality of the mustard-gas-laced killing
fields, and by the bitter words of Wilfred Owen, a British officer now
recognized as the greatest poet of the Great War. Owen reported from the
battlefields of France that, contrary to the prettified accounts being
served up, the war he witnessed was full of blood "gargling" up from
"froth-corrupted lungs" and "vile, incurable sores on innocent
tongues."
Owen's subject was, he declared, "war, and the pity of war." He
expressed it through dark word portraits, in which dead and dying young
men were stripped of any glory or sentimentality. Owen himself became one
of these inglorious casualties when he was killed in action at the age of
25, just days before the war's end, 85 years ago this week.
A revered figure in England, Owen found a large American following
during the Vietnam War. He is often portrayed as antiwar, which he was
not. What he stood for was seeing war clearly, which makes him especially
relevant today. The Bush administration has been loudly attacking the news
media for misreporting the Iraq conflict by leaving out good news. Owen
would counter — in vivid, gripping images — that it is the White House,
with its campaign to hide casualties from view, that is dangerously
distorting reality.
Owen was born in western England, near the Welsh border, to a
middle-class family. When the clouds of war were gathering, he was
embarking on a literary life. Like many young British men, he was caught
up in war fever. As Dominic Hibberd, a leading Owen scholar, relates in a
recent biography, Owen reacted to the German threat by writing a poem in
which he approvingly cited Horace's dictum, adding that it was "sweeter
still" to die in war "with brothers." He wrote to his mother, "I now do
most intensely want to fight."
Owen got his wish. He volunteered for the army in the fall of 1915, and
was sent to France. Being there gave him a "fine heroic feeling," he wrote
his mother a few months later. But before long, Owen was nearly killed by
a German sniper. Then, while stumbling in the dark, he fell into a 15-foot
pit and ended up with a concussion. "I have suffered seventh hell," he
wrote his mother.
A large shell exploded near his head weeks later, throwing him into the
air, and another, ghoulishly, exhumed a comrade, depositing his corpse
nearby. Owen was haunted by blood-soaked dreams and, after a diagnosis of
shell shock, he was committed to a war hospital. He befriended a fellow
patient, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, and embarked on his most prolific
period of writing. For Owen, the romance of war was by now long gone. He
wrote of one wounded soldier, "heavy like meat/And none of us could kick
him to his feet."
While convalescing, Owen wrote his greatest work, "Dulce et Decorum
Est," in which he provided a biting new take on Horace's assessment of
death in battle. The poem is an account of a gas attack, and of one
soldier too slow to put on his "clumsy helmet" who ends up "guttering,
choking, drowning." Owen concludes by caustically telling the reader that
if he had been there, "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."
When he recovered, Owen was sent back to France to fight. Ordered to
lead his troops across a canal into heavy enemy machine gun and mortar
fire, he was killed in the crossing. His mother received a telegram
reporting his death on Nov. 11, 1918, the day the war officially
ended.
Owen, who was commended posthumously for inflicting "considerable
losses on the enemy," was no pacifist. He told his mother he had a dual
mission: to lead his men "as well as an officer can" but also to watch
their "sufferings that I may speak of them." Owen was right that an
honorable approach to war requires both ably leading troops on the
battlefield, and reporting honestly what occurs there.
The Bush administration, however, is resisting this honorable approach.
In its eagerness to convince the public that things are going well in
Iraq, it is leading troops into battle, while trying its best to obscure
what happens to them. President Bush is not attending soldier funerals, as
previous presidents have, avoiding a television image that could sow
doubts in viewers' minds. He avoids mentioning the American dead — and the
injured, who are seven times as numerous. The Pentagon has sent out
emphatic reminders that television and photographic coverage is not
allowed of coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base.
There are already signs of public unease. Representative George
Nethercutt, a Republican running for the Senate in Washington, was
criticized last month for saying the media were focusing on "losing a
couple of soldiers every day" rather than the "better and more important"
story of progress in Iraq. (Mr. Nethercutt later complained that some
accounts left out that he said losing the soldiers "heaven forbid, is
awful.") But Mr. Nethercutt's was just the sort of bland formulation that
would have driven Owen wild.
Americans are already considering the relative merits of staying the
course in Iraq, putting in an international peacekeeping force, and even
pulling out. It is a somber debate, with great consequences for this
nation, and the world. We must enter into it with full information,
without lapsing into what Owen trenchantly called "the old lie" — or new
ones.
