Today is Memorial Day, or Armistice Day as it was originally called, to observe the armistice that ended the unprecedented carnage of the First World War.
Unprecedented as it was, and though it was thought to be the "War to end all war" at the time, it proved to be only the prelude to an even larger and more lethal convulsion 20 years later.
In our own time we don't have such enormous conflagrations. Instead we are faced with never-ending, meaningless, and pointless wars which have no objectives and no purpose, or at least none that can be clearly articulated. These are the product not of human agency, but of a war machine which lurches mindlessly toward an ever-receding horizon while sucking up men, money, and material and grinding out corpses, blood, and suffering.
These faraway conflicts sometimes seem unreal, as if they were nothing more than television productions. But they certainly are real to those who suffer and die in them.
I've chosen to mark this Memorial Day by re-reading the best-known poem of Wilfred Owen, an English combatant in World War I who was killed in combat during the war's final days. The Latin title and final lines translate approximately as, "It is proper and fitting to die for one's country."
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 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 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.
Pen and ink drawaing, "Fit for Active Service" by George Grosz, German, 1918.
