Adam Cohen reminds us today that Wilfred Owen, the great British poet, died in battle 85
years ago this week. You can disagree with his claim that Owen is wrongly portrayed as antiwar
— “[H]e was not,” Cohen writes. “What he stood for was seeing war clearly” — but Cohen’s
larger point that George W. Bush has dishonored the dead and wounded of his administration’s
Iraq war is incontrovertible.
The headline on today’s piece puts the issue in literary terms: “What World War I’s Greatest Poet Would Say About Hiding Our War
Dead.” But make no mistake: It’s an indictment. To spin the news and
obscure reality, “President Bush is not attending soldier funerals, as previous presidents have,”
Cohen writes, “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.”
This is the same gung-ho president, of course, who was only too willing to burnish his TV
image by dressing up in pilot’s gear and landing by jet on an aircraft carrier returning from war
duty in the Gulf. Meantime, the Pentagon prohibits photos and TV shots of coffins returning from
the Iraqi war zone.
Last December in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, I wrote: “People who argue for going to
war — any war — ought to read the poetry of Wilfred Owen. Let them read war reporter Chris
Hedges‘ just-published “War Is a Force That Gives Us
Meaning,” an antiwar cry from the heart that invokes these
lines from Owen’s World War I poem, ‘Dulce et
Decorum est,’ on the death of a soldier in a gas attack”:
If in 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.
It’s a side issue, but can anyone still believe that Owen was not antiwar after reading this
rebuttal of the poet Horace’s lines: “Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori” (It is sweet and right
to die for one’s country)?
