“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.