The Old Lie
The true irony of Remembrance Day is our insistence on forgetting its purpose
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.
By the time Wilfred Owen reached 18 years of age, he had already charted out his life’s path. An ardent reader and devotee of John Keats, two of his poems written in the prior year (Written in a Wood, September 1910, and Sonnet: Written at Teignmouth, on a Pilgrimage to Keats’s House) were written in Keats’ honour. As the imperial expansion of European powers augered towards all-out war, Owen worked patiently and inexorably towards his calling in poetry.
Hailing from a lower middle-class family (who, if he were to be believed in his youth, had descended from aristocracy and fallen into pastoralism), Owen was hungry for beauty in all its forms. During his stay in Wimbledon in the fall of 1911, he was a frequent visitor of galleries and museums in London. Of his time at the British Museum, he wrote of spending “hours in subdued ecstasy,” devouring Keats’ manuscripts, studying their handwriting, and making note of the corrections.
When Germany declared war on France in August of 1914, Owen was working as a tutor in France. By dint of his family’s class position, which denied him the prerequisite knowledge of the Greek language, his near-lifelong dream of attending Oxford had nearly evaporated. To gain a new perspective (and perhaps enough worldliness to edge his way into the university’s vaunted halls), he took up a position as an English teacher at the Berlitz school in Bordeaux.
He learned the French fluently enough to develop a Bordeaux accent, and a love for the café culture (though, in his letters to his mother, he assured her that he hadn’t fallen into the habit of indulging wine). Over the summer, he accepted an offer as a private tutor for in the Pyrenees for the Léger family. The family’s matriarch, a Parisian businesswoman, required English before her return to the city in the fall. By the time news of the war reached the Léger summer home, Owen was rather enjoying his full-time duties between improving the Madame’s English, and entertaining the Légers’ daughter Nénette with duets on the piano, and games of hide-and-seek.
Throughout the time he spent in France, Owen sought to improve his chances of study at Oxford by ingratiating himself with influential people. In fear of letting his talents stagnate, continued to work on his poetry. However, by 1915, the war had cast a pall over Bordeaux. It was also becoming increasingly likely that Britain would conscript its soldiers, and with the army opening its officer ranks to the lower middle class, Owen chose to enlist rather than be drafted.
Though Owen spent the vast majority of the war at home in Britain, due to suffering a concussion from falling into the crater of an exploded mortar, his naive, romantic view of war had given way to exhausted cynicism.
From Exposure (1917):
Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire,
Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.
What are we doing here?
During his convalescent stay in Edinburgh, Owen met fellow writer and poet Sigfried Sassoon. The two struck a deep, profound relationship which, some historians suggest, may have been a romantic one. Himself once a dreamer of patriotism and empire, Sassoon had quickly been plunged into the horrors of trench warfare. Soon afterwards, his poetry began to reflect the depression and trauma of an emerging modernism, fueled by the bodies of young men ground and mingled into lifeless meat for the territorial aspirations of idle aristocrats.
From The Counter-Attack (1918):
An officer came blundering down the trench:
“Stand-to and man the fire step!” On he went ...
Gasping and bawling, “Fire-step ... counter-attack!”
Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right
Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left;
And stumbling figures looming out in front.
“O Christ, they’re coming at us!” Bullets spat,
And he remembered his rifle ... rapid fire ...
And started blazing wildly ... then a bang
Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out
To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked
And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,
Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans ...
Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,
Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.
The following year, wracked with what appeared to be survivor’s guilt, Sassoon returned to active combat in the Western Front. Less than two months later, he was shot in the head — a friendly fire incident. He returned to England, this time for good. Owen would follow in his footsteps, departing for France as the Alliance was making its final push towards a decisive victory against Germany.
He returned to England as a corpse.
Wilfred Owen was killed while attempting to take the western side of the Oise-Sambre Canal. Shouting for the men under his command to fashion a makeshift bridge from wooden planks, he was hit by German machine-gun fire. Over a thousand men were killed in the attempt to cross the canal and breach German lines, which ultimately failed.
The survivors of the attempt would ultimately cross the canal via an existing road bridge, just a few kilometres south.
Over a hundred years later, and millions upon millions more dead in service to — and as a result of — the boundless greed and ambition of the ruling class, the poetry and symbolism of the anti-war movement that emerged in the wake of The Great War has amounted to less than nothing.
The poppy, once a symbol of the blood of young men who died for no purpose relevant to their own lives or that of their communities, now serves the opposite purpose: a gauche signifier of support for more war, more territorial aggression, more ethnic cleansing. The gallantry and virtue of the military officer is not only taken for granted, but social compliance with “honoring the troops” is strictly enforced, no matter how vile and inhumane the accounts of their killing, torture, rape, and bodily desecration of civilians and enemy combatants alike.
How many writers would have emerged from Iraq, if not for the 2005 invasion? How many poets in Gaza have been obliterated by glide bombs while at morning prayer? The answer to that question, as with the millions of war dead from 1914-1918, lies in the decaying flesh, blood, and bone spread across poisoned soil by the bombs we continue to manufacture and deploy relentlessly.
A pitiful and damning irony, then, that our day of remembrance has so wholly and efficiently been warped into an annual celebration of war propaganda, and collective amnesia.
Lest we forget.