Quoting Ed Weick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> "Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori." (Wilfred Owen)
And in that time
people will seek death,
but they will not find it,
for death will flee from them.
(--Werner Herzog, _Lessons of Darkness_.
from memory)
\brad mccormick
>
> Ed Weick
>
>
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> November 9, 2003
> EDITORIAL OBSERVER
> What World War I's Greatest Poet Would Say About Hiding Our War
> Dead
> By ADAM COHEN
>
> hen World War I broke out, the English saw going off to battle as
> a fine thing to do. They embraced the Latin poet Horace's dictum, "Dulce
> et decorum est, pro patria mori" — It is sweet and proper to die for
> one's country. But four years later, that romantic notion had been
> shattered by the grim reality of the mustard-gas-laced killing fields,
> and by the bitter words of Wilfred Owen, a British officer now
> recognized as the greatest poet of the Great War. Owen reported from the
> battlefields of France that, contrary to the prettified accounts being
> served up, the war he witnessed was full of blood "gargling" up from
> "froth-corrupted lungs" and "vile, incurable sores on innocent
> tongues."
>
> Owen's subject was, he declared, "war, and the pity of war." He
> expressed it through dark word portraits, in which dead and dying young
> men were stripped of any glory or sentimentality. Owen himself became
> one of these inglorious casualties when he was killed in action at the
> age of 25, just days before the war's end, 85 years ago this week.
>
> A revered figure in England, Owen found a large American following
> during the Vietnam War. He is often portrayed as antiwar, which he was
> not. What he stood for was seeing war clearly, which makes him
> especially relevant today. The Bush administration has been loudly
> attacking the news media for misreporting the Iraq conflict by leaving
> out good news. Owen would counter — in vivid, gripping images — that it
> is the White House, with its campaign to hide casualties from view, that
> is dangerously distorting reality.
>
> Owen was born in western England, near the Welsh border, to a
> middle-class family. When the clouds of war were gathering, he was
> embarking on a literary life. Like many young British men, he was caught
> up in war fever. As Dominic Hibberd, a leading Owen scholar, relates in
> a recent biography, Owen reacted to the German threat by writing a poem
> in which he approvingly cited Horace's dictum, adding that it was
> "sweeter still" to die in war "with brothers." He wrote to his mother,
> "I now do most intensely want to fight."
>
> Owen got his wish. He volunteered for the army in the fall of
> 1915, and was sent to France. Being there gave him a "fine heroic
> feeling," he wrote his mother a few months later. But before long, Owen
> was nearly killed by a German sniper. Then, while stumbling in the dark,
> he fell into a 15-foot pit and ended up with a concussion. "I have
> suffered seventh hell," he wrote his mother.
>
> A large shell exploded near his head weeks later, throwing him
> into the air, and another, ghoulishly, exhumed a comrade, depositing his
> corpse nearby. Owen was haunted by blood-soaked dreams and, after a
> diagnosis of shell shock, he was committed to a war hospital. He
> befriended a fellow patient, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, and embarked on
> his most prolific period of writing. For Owen, the romance of war was by
> now long gone. He wrote of one wounded soldier, "heavy like meat/And
> none of us could kick him to his feet."
>
> While convalescing, Owen wrote his greatest work, "Dulce et
> Decorum Est," in which he provided a biting new take on Horace's
> assessment of death in battle. The poem is an account of a gas attack,
> and of one soldier too slow to put on his "clumsy helmet" who ends up
> "guttering, choking, drowning." Owen concludes by caustically telling
> the reader that if he had been there, "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."
>
> When he recovered, Owen was sent back to France to fight. Ordered
> to lead his troops across a canal into heavy enemy machine gun and
> mortar fire, he was killed in the crossing. His mother received a
> telegram reporting his death on Nov. 11, 1918, the day the war
> officially ended.
>
> Owen, who was commended posthumously for inflicting "considerable
> losses on the enemy," was no pacifist. He told his mother he had a dual
> mission: to lead his men "as well as an officer can" but also to watch
> their "sufferings that I may speak of them." Owen was right that an
> honorable approach to war requires both ably leading troops on the
> battlefield, and reporting honestly what occurs there.
>
> The Bush administration, however, is resisting this honorable
> approach. In its eagerness to convince the public that things are going
> well in Iraq, it is leading troops into battle, while trying its best to
> obscure what happens to them. President Bush is not attending soldier
> funerals, as previous presidents have, avoiding a television image that
> could sow doubts in viewers' minds. He avoids mentioning the American
> dead — and the injured, who are seven times as numerous. The Pentagon
> has sent out emphatic reminders that television and photographic
> coverage is not allowed of coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base.
>
> There are already signs of public unease. Representative George
> Nethercutt, a Republican running for the Senate in Washington, was
> criticized last month for saying the media were focusing on "losing a
> couple of soldiers every day" rather than the "better and more
> important" story of progress in Iraq. (Mr. Nethercutt later complained
> that some accounts left out that he said losing the soldiers "heaven
> forbid, is awful.") But Mr. Nethercutt's was just the sort of bland
> formulation that would have driven Owen wild.
>
> Americans are already considering the relative merits of staying
> the course in Iraq, putting in an international peacekeeping force, and
> even pulling out. It is a somber debate, with great consequences for
> this nation, and the world. We must enter into it with full information,
> without lapsing into what Owen trenchantly called "the old lie" — or new
> ones.
>
>
>
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--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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