Here's a poem by the famous WW1 war hero and poet, Wilfred Owen:
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 disappointed shells 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 floundering 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.
Wilfred Owen (1893 -1918)
There is a very good website here that tells of Owen's life and friendship with Siegried Sassoon, another famous war poet, who also assisted Owen with many of his works.
Owen suffered from shell-shock, a common disorder for troops in the trenches, and was lucky enough to be sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, near Edinburgh, which was where he first met Sassoon. I said "lucky enough," because many shell-shocked soldiers were given horrendous electric shock treatment, before being quickly returned to the front line.
He wasn't so lucky though, just before the war ended:
The period in Craiglockhart, and the early part of 1918, was in many ways his most creative, and he wrote many of the poems for which he is remembered today. In June 1918 he rejoined his regiment at Scarborough and then in August he returned to France. He was awarded the Military Cross for bravery at Amiens, but was killed on the 4th November whilst attempting to lead his men across the Sambre canal at Ors. The news of his death reached his parents on November 11th 1918, the day of the armistice.
That actually saved their marriage. He was stationed at Norfolk, Virginia. My dad never went overseas. He spent the war in Jacksonville, Florida, flying U-boat patrols. They nailed a couple of them, too. He and his dive bomber squadron got as far as California to deploy on an aircraft carrier for the Pacific but their orders were changed. That carrier was later almost destroyed by suicide planes. And then there are the brave kids fighting today in Afghanistan. Is this a great country or what? Finally, because this is my friend Smersh's thread, I honor the brave British soldiers fighting and dying in Afghanistan as well.
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