We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here....
The songs of the British Tommy had turned to a leary cynicism by 1917.
The unquestioning patriotism of 1914 had long vanished in the barbed wire machine-gun slaughter mustard gas reality of trench warfare of Ypres Salient, The Somme and Mons.
Wilfred Owen, who in my view wrote the most devastating truth about the horror of the trenches of the Western Front, was born on the Welsh Borders but grew up in Birkenhead.
He died in the trenches in 1918 - one month before the Armistice.
He wrote this.
It's called Dulce et Decrorum Est Pro Patria Mori:
It is Sweet and Fitting to Die For Your Country
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.
8 October 1917 - March, 1918
