Dulce Et Decorum Est

Throughout the history of the human race, warfare has defined the growth of civilization. Whether it involves the destruction of the most miniscule villages to the greatest empires, whether their motives were noble or more sinister, wars have shaped the development of human history to form the experience that we understand as the present. Tragically, in the entire history of the world and its wars, many different kinds of great leaders—cultural, political and even religious—have failed to consider the human side of war, the side of the poor masses killing only to survive. It is this failure, along with a need to make the poor masses willing to kill on a grand scale, that leads many leaders to deliver “great” oratory glorifying war and its qualities.

Owen begins his poem from a first person point of view of a soldier on the western front. He vividly describes sludge-filled trenches, blood-shod men and men who were “drunk with fatigue, deaf even to the hoots (Owen, 2-7). This evidence is already enough to prove Owen’s point on the horrors of war. However, Owen continues on with a descriptive account of a horrifying gas attack in which one man's petrifying death is described. “As under a green sea, I saw him drowning”(Owen 14). He then sets up the conclusion with a simile-filled description of the dead soldier’s body. “...The blood Come[sic] gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud” (Owen 21-23). Finally, he ends the poem by reciting “the old lie,” Horace’s famous lines, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (Sweet and honorable it is to die for one's homeland) (Owen 27-28). It is Owen's goal that the lines he has written on the horrors of war will prove to the reader that the “old lie” is what it is, a lie. However many, like Winston Churchill, for one reason or another, will