“Who’s for the game?”

“Who’s for the trench – Are you, my laddie?”

These are words from poems by Jessie Pope, poet and propagandist well-known for her patriotic and motivational poetry that was originally published in the Daily Mail to encourage enlistment at the beginning of the Great War. Another poem renowned for expressing the patriotic ideals that characterised pre-war England was Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier, a sonnet in which Brooke speaks in the guise of an English soldier as he is leaving home to go to the Great War. It portrays death for one’s country as a noble end and England as the noblest country for which to die:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England

Or, as the Roman lyrical poet, Horace, had it in his Odes: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (How sweet and honourable it is to die for one’s country).

Later, however, when the grim realities of the war had set in, Wilfrid Owen chose to express in his poetry a very different kind of sentiment, and when he wrote this poem whilst recovering from shell-shock in a hospital near Edinburgh in 1917, he borrowed from Horace’s phrase for his title: Dulce et decorum est.

No jingoism here, no rose-tinted romanticism nor noble ideals. This poem speaks instead from Owen’s direct experience; a vignette from the trenches, where the gruesome effects of a chlorine gas attack are described in compelling detail. It makes for grim reading. Wilfrid Owen, who dedicated this poem to Jessie Pope herself (I wonder how that went down?), at least provides us with an artistry of words in this description of the horror of the front line. But he reminds us that, were we to experience first-hand the reality of war, we may hesitate to repeat platitudes such as Horace’s “old Lie”.

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 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.