The Next War

Wilfred Owen

 One-hundred and twenty-two years ago today, on March 18th, 1893, British poet Wilfred Owen was born in Shropshire, England.  Perhaps the most admired poet of the First World War, Owen is best known for the poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est."

A less familiar poem "The Next War," was written at Craiglockhart Hospital, while he was a patient there being treated for shell shock.  Although the poem was revised by Owen in July of 1918, this is the version that was published in September of 1917 in The Hydra, Craiglockhart's magazine written and edited by patients.

The Next War, by Wilfred Owen

"War's a joke for me and you,
While we know such dreams are true."
- Sassoon

Death Intoxicated, Percy Smith

Out there, we've walked quite friendly up to Death;
Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland, –
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We've sniffed the green thick odour of his breath, –
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn't writhe.
He's spat at us with bullets and he's coughed
Shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft;
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against his powers.
We laughed, knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars; when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death – for Life; not men –  for flags.
                         ------------

"Out there," on the Western Front, death is inconceivably different from anything that can be imagined by those at home in Britain.  On the battlefields, Death is no stranger.  He is an "old chum," with whom men join their voices when his shells sing "aloft."  He is the elderly, phlegmatic uncle who spits and coughs not mucous, but bullets and shrapnel.  He is the trusted servant who performs the most intimate of tasks, shaving men with his scythe, cutting short their beards and their lives.   He is ever-present in the bodies of unburied comrades who shore up the trench walls or who lie in No Man's Land as men eat from their mess-tins.  And as soldiers climb out of their trenches to go over the top, they walk up to Death "quite friendly," despite the "green thick odour of his breath."

Death is a regular member of the company, and the second stanza confidently proclaims that Death is not the enemy of the men who fight.  Who then is the enemy?  Who pays soldiers to submit to death rather than "kick against his powers"?  Who accepts soldiers' death as part of the cost of war?

Canadian Recruiting Poster

Owen's poem is a prophetic voice that warns "better men" of the future against those who will persuade them to fight "greater wars."  The poem warns soldiers against being duped by propaganda to think they are fighting a noble cause for Life, when they are actually only killing men "for flags" – in the service of national interests.

In October of 1917, Owen send a copy of the poem home to his mother.  He wrote that he had included it "to strike a note" and that he wanted his younger brother Colin (who was seventeen at the time) to "read, mark, learn etc it."

Wilfred Owen's Coming of Age poem

Is it possible that the most iconic poem of the Great War, Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” is about more than war?  The poem very clearly takes as its subject an episode from  the First World War: it is anchored on the front line of the Western Front, during a gas attack, and it vehemently argues that war is not glorious.   

This is the poem as it is read during Remembrance Day ceremonies and as it is taught in schools, but to see it solely as an account of a battle incident that occurred nearly 100 years ago forces the poem into a strait-jacket. 

For this is also a poem about that moment when the world tilts crazily on its axis.  It’s the moment when we realize that something essential we’ve been told, an absolute we’ve believed in, a conviction we’ve firmly held --  does not fit the reality of our experience. 

The poem poignantly describes that moment of re-visioning:  the “boys” of the attack are transformed and appear as hags and old beggars; events take on a dreamlike quality as if seen from a distance “through misty panes and thick green light,” while everyone else, deaf and blind, marches on “asleep,” moving forward without consciousness or purpose, simply out of habits of conformity.   

All except the voice that speaks in the poem.  It cries out in protest and disbelief:  this is not how war — how life —how death —are supposed to be. 

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,

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.

Fifty-five years after Wilfred Owen finished his revisions of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” in 1973 the American author and screenwriter William Goldman explored the same theme in his novel The Princess Bride: “Life isn't fair, Bill. We tell our children that it is, but it's a terrible thing to do. It's not only a lie, it's a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it's never going to be....The wrong people die, some of them, and the reason is this; life is not fair.  Forget all the garbage your parents put out."  

Owen would have understood.    

"Dulce et Decorum Est" was published in 1920, posthumously, after Wilfred Owen was killed while trying to cross the Sambre-Oise canal in France in one of the last, futile battles of the Great War.  He died one week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the peace treaty that ended the war.  His mother received the telegram informing her of his death on Armistice Day, as church bells rang out to celebrate the war’s end. 

Here is a link of Christopher Eccleston reading the poem.