Brilliant poet, tragic waste
Armistice Day always feel a little strange for EU officials. It is a public holiday in Belgium but not for us, so when I came into work earlier this morning rue de la Loi and rue Belliard – both normally densely congested thoroughfares – were deserted. Nevertheless, this sombre day and what it records is what brought the European integration process into being and it is good to remember that for, in terms of living consciousness, the First World War is now as far away as Waterloo and the Napoleonic wars. As the remaining survivors of that era dwindle into nothingness, we will remember it chiefly now through historical accounts and recordings of one sort or another. In my own case, both my grandfathers saw service in the 1914-18 war, but only one of them was still alive by the time I was born and he never spoke about his experiences (we think he was in France for the first, suicidal, Somme offensive). So, comic book accounts aside, my first proper introduction to the horrors of that war was through amateur dramatics and literature: Oh! What a Lovely War and Sherriff on the stage (I played Mason in Journey’s End), and the war poets – Graves, Sassoon and above all Owen. Chillingly, by the time we got to play soldiers on the stage we were probably older than many of the boy-men we were impersonating. I studied Owen’s poems (most of them published after his death) for O level and they made a very deep impression on me. Owen himself died, shot trying to cross a canal, just one week before the Armistice (his mother received the telegram bearing the bad news on Armistice Day itself, as church bells rang all around her). Having seen the immense promise in his poetry, it seemed such a terrible, terrible waste to me but, then, that could have been a good description for the whole war. I am reproducing what I consider to be his greatest poem, Dulce et Decorum Est, below the cut-off line for this post. But here are the telling last lines:
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
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 tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped 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,
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.
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