Monday, April 15, 2013

A Word of Warning: World War I



Title: World War I
Date: 1914-1918
Nationality: Continental Europe, United States
Creator: Man
Medium: Death

Title: Dulce Et Decorum Est
Date: 1920
Nationality: United Kingdom
Creator: Wilfred Owen
Medium: Print

British 55th Division gas casualties 10 April 1918

A Canadian soldier with mustard gas burns, ca. 1917–1918.



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 disappointed shells 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 floundering 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.

World War I takes an important place among the artifacts of learning.  It shows that learning is not a moral activity, as some have suggested.  Learning flowers and it cares not which way it grows—toward life and progress or death and destruction.  Within this war all learning is encompassed, encapsulated, and sealed in the muddy tombs of the dead.  I have included Wilfred Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est as a profound expression of the war itself: created in the form of a broken and chaotic version of the French ballad—the beauty replaced by the stark nakedness of death in war, a nightmare that haunts the living in place of the sweet dream that accompanies life.  It is a warning call to those who would forget or retell the “old lie”: Dulce et decorum est pro patria moriHow sweet and right it is to die for one's country” (“Dulce”).  Learning is not moral, and for that morality must ever accompany it.  They are bound together; for if they separate, the one will slay the other.


"Dulce Et Decorum Est," Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulce_et_Decorum_est

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