Wilfred Owen 125 -- March 18, 2018

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Wilfred Owen, army officer and war poet was born 125 years ago today, on 18-March-1893.  While leading his troops on the Western Front, he was severely wounded and shell shocked.  At the Craiglockhart War Hospital, he met fellow war poet Siegfried Sassoon.  After he was discharged from the hospital, Owen could have spent the rest of the war on light duty, but he insisted on returning to the front.  He felt that it lent weight to his reporting on the terrors of the war.  He was awarded the Military Cross for an action at Joncourt.  He was killed on 04-November-1918, one week before the Armistice, during an action at the Sambre-Oise Canal.

Most of his poems were published after the war. Siegfried Sassoon helped to get them into print.

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(14) for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.