Wilfred Owen's war poetry

One of my favourite poems is Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, arguably one of the greatest anti-war poems of all time. Its extraordinary vividness, combined with its manifest sincerity and power, give it an almost iconic status amongst “public poems” — poems that address a public subject.

As a reminder, here it is in full:


DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Wilfred Owen

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 onwards 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 heavy 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 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.


In the nature of poetry, one becomes used to certain aspects, however marvellously achieved. They may even metamorphose into a kind of template, on which other poems are constructed, of a lesser nature, so that after a while it is difficult not to view them through the subsequent accretia.

One of the functions of poetry is to recreate afresh the same human experiences. When the Iraq war started I supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but believed that the occupying forces should remove themselves afterwards as soon as possible. Motivated by this view, I did my best to write a poem which suggested how easily such an occupation, if it becomes protracted, can become counterproductive. The poem was written in 2003, a few months after the invasion. My beef, if I may call it that, is not with the overthrow of Saddam, but with the nature of the subsequent occupation. Called Keeping the Peace, the poem attempts to evoke the experience of an occupying detachment of American soldiers who are ambushed by an angry crowd of local citizens.

If I have a criticism of Dulce et Decorum Est, it is that one knows the position of the author in the first few lines of the poem, and the anti-war message is driven home relentlessly throughout. This does not, in my opinion, reduce its greatness; at least part of its impact is due to its unequivocal ideological commitment. In Keeping the Peace, by contrast, I tried to hide the position of the narrator, apparently taking the viewpoint of the American soldiers, so that the narrative itself could make the underlying political or philosophical argument.

Meanwhile, in the real world the recent relative success of the US “surge” in troops in Iraq has resulted in a welcome reduction of violence, and a partial return of the vestiges of civil life. I would be the last to begrudge these signs of progress in what has been a brutal and terrible conflict. Meanwhile, I also hope that the west, particularly America and Britain, studies and learns the lessons of the war.

To me at least these centre on the observation that one may easily enough successfully overthrow a tyrannical regime with a careful application of military force, but any subsequent attempt at occupation and “stabilisation” will be appallingly difficult, and may even be a unifying target for those same authoritarian forces which the invasion was originally aimed to confront.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, I would dearly like to see some originality in the strategy of occupation in addition to the ubiquitous arguments about when to pull out. In Iraq, I believe the partitioning into three separate autonomous states should have been much more seriously considered. This could at least give Kurds, Sunnis and Shia their own national heartlands (reverting to something akin to pre-colonial boundaries), and it would underwrite the most successful aspect of the Iraq war to date — the emergence of a relatively free democratic Kurdish region after decades of Kurdish persecution. In Afghanistan, a radical overhaul of policy would I hope include the purchase of the poppy crop directly from the peasant farmers. As a number of commentators have already argued, this would both infuse life-giving funds into the rural economy and cut out the middlemen and profiteers who currently exploit the illegal crop. Equally importantly, it would help to sever the link between poor farmers and the Taliban, who currently are the major political beneficiaries of the illegal poppy industry.

For what it is worth, I reiterate the point that I am not a pacifist, and do not consider all war to be in error. Keeping the Peace is specifically about the problems which arise when an invading occupier, however well intentioned, attempts a military administration of a foreign culture. The full poem is set out below.