It's a direct response to Jessie Pope, an English poet and propagandist who would write poems like "Who's for the Game?", implying that the great war was all a bit of fun and those who didn't want to go were cowards.
Owen had actually been in the trenches, and tragically died only a few days before the armistice.
The second is “Dulce et decorum est”, which we studied and analysed for “O” level. This poem, very much, is not a party-trick.
Later, I thought that the job of a soldier wasn’t to die for their country but to make someone else die for theirs. Perhaps that more cynical view was influenced by the poem and the other war poets that we covered.
山坡羊·潼关怀古 张养浩
峰峦如聚，波涛如怒，山河表里潼关路。望西都，意踌躇。 伤心秦汉经行处，宫阙万间都做了土。兴，百姓苦；亡，百姓苦。
Tune: “Sheep on the Hillside” —Tong Pass
Zhang Yanghao
Translated by Wayne Schlepp
Peaks as if massed,
Waves that look angry,
Along the mountains and the river lies the road to Tong Pass.
I look to the West Capital,
My thoughts unsettled.
Here, where the Qin and Han armies passed, I lament
The ten thousand palaces, all turned to dust.
Kingdoms rise,
The people suffer;
Kingdoms fall,
The people suffer.
We’re on a route uncharted, fire and blood erase our tracks. On we fly, on wings of thunder, never more to sheath our swords. All of us in battle fallen, not to be brought back by words.
Will there be a rendezvous? I know not. I only know we still must fight. We are sand grains in infinity, never to meet,never more see light.
Farewell then my son. Farewell then my conscience. My youth and my solace my one and my only.
And let this farewell be the end of a story, Of solitude vast and which none is more lonely. In which you remain,barred forever and ever, From light and from air,with your death pangs untold. Untold and unsoothed, not to be resurrected. Forever and ever, an 18 year old.
Farewell then, no trains ever come from those regions Unscheduled or scheduled, no aeroplanes fly there. Farewell then my son, for no miracles happen, As in this world dreams do not come true.
Farewell…
I will dream of you still as a baby, Treading the earth with little strong toes, The earth where already so many lie buried. This song to my son, is come to its close.
Son (Pavel Antokolsky, 1943)
At the starting of the week
At summit talks you'll hear
them speak
It's only Monday
You could be sitting,
taking lunch
The news will hit you like
a punch
It's only Tuesday
We'll all go running
underground
And we'll be listening for
the sound
It's only Wednesday
You'll hear a whistling
overhead
Are you alive or are you
dead?
It's only Thursday
Though that shelter is your
home
The living space, you have
outgrown
It's only Friday
Tomorrow never comes until
it's too late
I wonder if you can age a person based on them knowing this and whatever the Siegfried Sassoon poem that was covered in order to demonstrate onomatopoeia? I suppose it would depend how long it was (or indeed if it still is) part of the curriculum.
Another poem from Craiglockhart is Sassoon's "Repression of War Experience." It is one of the relatively uncommon works, both as literature and clinically, that depicts the sensory experience associated with PTSD. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57267/repression-of-w...
Incidentally, Rivers himself also wrote a paper titled "The Repression of War Experience." It was published in The Lancet around the same time. https://archive.is/EZerl
A century later, I believe the poet's attempt was more successful than the scientist's in sharing the data.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/mar/04/iran-war-...
https://theintercept.com/2025/12/05/boat-strike-survivors-do...
I am Indian and I feel ashamed.
I like this version by The Men They Couldn't Hang best :
Or, perhaps, Vera Lynn's "We'll meet again some sunny day".
These are good movies to rewatch, especially in these interesting times.
My French language teacher at one college or other told me a story once. I might be getting some of the details wrong, so forgive me. But here goes:
In 1914 or thereabouts, his grandfather, a young French man, had just graduated from lycée or whatever and celebrated by backpacking around Europe, staying in youth hostels, riding trains, etc. He drank a lot of alcohol, made a lot of new friends, and generally had a great time.
In Germany, he wandered into a pub, encountered some friendly Germans, and joined them at a table. One drink turned into three, or five, or six, and the young Frenchman started attempting to speak the German spoken by his new friends. Perhaps he had a gift for languages, perhaps he'd picked up a little through some other means, perhaps the disinhibitory effect of alcohol helped his short-term recall for syntax and semantics.
Either way, the result was the same - the young Frenchman climbed up onto a table and made a brief, impromptu speech in German, addressed to his new friends, full of affection, extolling the virtues of modernity, goodwill and brotherhood, etc.
The rest of the pub was absolutely _alarmed_ by the young Frenchman's grasp of German. There was no way, they thought, that he could speak German so well. He must be a spy. The police were called, and he was thrown in jail.
Then the war broke out, and returning the young man to France was not anyone's concern. He spent the war locked up in Germany.
I can repeat that story, but I can't personally vouch for it. It's hearsay three or four times removed. It's a funny story, a little awful, but he's free in the end. Everything worked out.
But the awful punchline is something I do tend to believe - that his grandfather was the only survivor of all of the young men from his graduating class. Every other one died in the war.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xy0htPZZPs [2] https://genius.com/The-zombies-butchers-tale-western-front-1...
I studied it in school as did my children at their school, decades later.
They also studied the Caesar' savage Gallic Wars ( in English and in Latin ) and Thucydides History of the Peloponsesian War.
Thucydides is essential reading these days.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/opinion/america-china-tru...
Fortunately, at least in my time, this was part of the curriculum in UK schools, and we had an exceptional English teacher. Like one of the other commenters here, I'm a science and numbers man, but can recite this poem still. Perhaps it was particularly memorable as I have an ancestor who occupies Sanctuary Wood as a consequence of a gas shell.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001df48 [2] https://open.spotify.com/episode/2nd5iWVnNCWL2ulAVsSDLe
CBRN defence imposes a substantial burden on modern militaries. Our infantry CBRN kit alone weighed 4.5kg, roughly the same weight as ten loaded 30-round STANAG magazines. That penalty applies to every soldier and similar burdens apply to vehicles, emplacements, heavy equipment. It increases fuel consumption, maintenance, logistics.
The training burden is also significant. In my experience nearly 8% of training time was dedicated to CBRN defence, more than marksmanship or signalling.
Operating under CBRN threat severely degrades ops tempo. Buttoning up slows movement, comms, situational awareness and command effectiveness. Speed and violence of action suffer and op tempo can drop by half or more. The impact on combat support and support units is worse than combat units. Naval and air forces fare worse again, with large decontamination requirements affecting sortie tempo, all external operations, and resupply. Even without casualties, the threat alone severely degrades manoeuvre warfare. They act as a force divisor.
The author reverses the logic. Modern militaries avoid chemical weapons for political reasons, not because they are ineffective. After WW1 they became politically toxic, and the Geneva Protocol has held because any state using them today would face immediate international condemnation and serious domestic political consequences.
The problem with your country (at least the vast majority of countries) is that it doesn't care about you. It's just too big to care. It has almost nothing to do with you.
I can't wrap my mind around the fact that people feel some affiliation with their country. For the vast majority of people, the relationship is akin to an abusive boyfriend/girlfriend who takes your money and ignores your existence.
It only reciprocates for a tiny number of people at the very top; everyone else is delusional.
The slots at the top are extremely limited. The country should never be the focus; people should engage with local community instead. The country can only be appreciated in the context of a local community.
My ancestors' country had (and still have) nice values. Used to be under the control of France, then switched to British control, then back to French control. This happened without any war or fighting. Nothing changed for the people. They even kept speaking French. Many got rich still; just had to decide which parasite to pay tax to.
Before they learned this, they had actually fought wars against the British, but for what? The British later ended up protecting them. Protecting their own tax proceeds, really...
If the people are strong-willed and have a strong sense of community and know what is actually important, the owner country doesn't really matter. People won't obey laws they don't agree with anyway. They'll just manipulate the local authorities to report whatever they want to higher ups. What is the parent country going to do if they don't get the results they want, kill everyone in the country?
It's like having a donkey, you know you can't win with it.
It's the reason why US failed to maintain control in Iraq and Afghanistan. The people didn't need to fight to reclaim their country. In spite of massive military power asymmetry. This effect works with large populations and small populations. What more proof do we need? Fighting exists just to sell weapons IMO.
It's crazy to me that everyone assumes that you have to obey authority. People forget this only happens with consensus. You can just pretend to obey, do the bare minimum and let the authorities blame bureaucracy. Anyway these big governments have real major bureaucratic struggles internally anyway so they're used to it.
Everyone is clutching onto narratives and blind-spots.
It's very easy to die "for something" when you're already dying. The question is how much of your life you're willing to give up for something by dying right now.
People talk about "dying for your country" as if it's all one and the same, but some people die for the people in their country and some people merely die for the interests of their state.
This prompted me to look up the ode, and I can't figure out the Latin meter. Does anyone know?
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
dul.cet.de.co:.rest.|pro:.pa.tri.a:.mo.ri:
mor.set.fu.ga:.cem.|per.se.qui.tur.vi.rum
nec.par.ci.tin.bel.li:s.iu.ven.tae
po:pli.ti.bus.ti.mi.do:.que.ter.go
Reading it like in school (with qualitative stress marking the quantitative meter), that would be:
dulcét decórest | pró patriá morí
morsét fugácem | pérsequitúr virúm
nec párcit ínbellís iuvéntae
póplitibús timidóque térgo.
Lewis and Short doesn't mark that o short or long. This also occurred with vexo, which I assumed was because the first syllable of anything starting with vex- is necessarily long (because the 'x' is two non-liquid consonants).
In the case of poples, 'l' is a liquid and a short vowel could be revealed by the syllabification po-ples (or po-pli-), but I guess this is never attested? This verse can't answer the question because the syllable is allowed to be long.
Minor note: I was taught that forms of esse are weak enough that they lose their vowel to elision, so it would be de.co:.rust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodelision
This seems like it would never matter for esse or est, but I guess it could preserve a long vowel in a case like -V: es V-.
I had a friend who was reading it, and she loaned it to me, and it got me much more into poetry. I read the intro and was hooked. The whole series is pretty good, too.
Randall Jarrell's "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57860/the-death-of-th... Is a much grimmer perspective.
Richard Grenier captured the truth for civil society: "As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." (h/t https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/07/rough-men/)
All we have of freedom, all we use or know – This our fathers bought for us long and long ago. Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw— Leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the Law. Rudyard Kipling, The Old Issue, 1899 https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/kipling/old_issue/
In a way it's sadder than other conflicts: none of the participants entered the war for power or control, they all thought they were defending themselves. Plenty of people knew the human cost would be high. Events and fear and lack of fast communication just took over. And it set up the conditions for WW2 and probably the cold war.
Most of the countries in WWI - which this poem is about - entered the war because of existing alliances, not because they were personally affected by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
While the US was indeed attacked by the Japanese in WWII, they could have focused entirely on the PTO and left their allies across the Atlantic to fend for themselves. Instead hundreds of thousands of Americans died liberating Europe.
The Vietnam War was at root the US supporting an allied government in Saigon. Tens of thousands of Americans died for an entirely different country than their own, one they'd likely never been to. A tragedy, but a tragedy that's been in the history books for fifty years now.
The Gulf War was 42 separate countries banding together to liberate Kuwait from an Iraqi invasion. How many of those soldiers had ever even thought about Kuwait before being deployed and potentially dying there?
When the US was attacked by Osama Bin Laden, the US invaded Afghanistan in response. Whether or not that was a justifiable decision, at the time dozens of countries lent their support. Their soldiers died for the sake of the US, though in this case maybe some of them had at least visited it.
This isn't an endorsement of dying for someone else's country (or even one's own); just an observation that it was normal even when this poem was written, hardly modern and no need for an "update" (perhaps just an expansion of the original). I also don't want this to come across as a defense of the US or Israeli action in Iran, which I assume is what you're referring to, so I'll be explicit about my position on this: the Iranian regime may be unquestionably awful, but not only is this attack illegal domestically (in the US) and internationally, I have extraordinarily little faith that either Netanyahu's Israel or Trump's US are going to handle this war or its aftermath well, and I'm terrified about the chaos that's likely to unfold over the coming months and years.
But: this sort of thing is precisely why Israelis/Zionists/Jews often view criticisms of Israel as anti-semitic. Things that have long been considered totally normal - military alliances, in this instance - are suddenly treated as novel and uniquely awful when Israel is involved. So their question becomes, "what's unique about Israel that makes people treat us differently", and then they look at their status as the only ethnically Jewish state and the history of how the world has treated Jews and derive themselves an answer. Especially when the complaint is rooted in an age old anti-semitic trope - “Jews secretly control the world” - just with “Jews” swapped out for “Israel”.
US army is more like mercenaries on a misson. Besides, Us soldiers have not fought on US mainland for century
Iraq was Dick Cheney's sponsors making money from oil and arms deals.
Afghanistan was Bush's sponsors making money from weapons procurement.
Iran is Trump's sponsors making money from oil and arms deals, plus some crusading crank millenarianism for the faithful.
Gaza is a straightforward land grab and real estate development opportunity with some cynical other-abuse thrown in.
None of these have anything at all to do with realistic threats to non-rich people.
It's always money. Always. Someone always makes money from these things.
The disposable shlub in the Oval Office gets the reputational damage, but their funders are so happy they can barely count.
It seems ungrateful to view it this way. We owe a real debt to the soldiers who died for the world we live in. It seems like we should owe them respect. However, we need to recognize that this kind of respect, while indeed owed, is also sometimes abused by politicians to field armies at affordable prices in the service of their own greed and vanity.
If, "War is the continuation of politics by other means", then we must demand better policy from our politicians than what we're seeing today.
After Khamenei death Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement that Russia is "against killing of the leaders of sovereign countries". Somehow they didn't mention nor regular citizens nor rank-and-file soldiers of sovereign countries.
In the Spanish series "El Cid" there is a nice depiction of how a battle and the whole war immediately ends once the king of one side is killed in that battle. Everybody just went back to their regular business.
A translation of saying in Russian, not sure whether it exists in English - "One's heroism is always a result of incompetency and idiotism of somebody else."
Rich, coming from the state that sponsored more than a dozen assassination attempts on Zelenskyy. But russians get over this hypocrisy by not recognizing a country as sovereign, so it's fair game.
Killing is the biggest taboo and people need societal "absolution" afterwards.
The absence of this for Vietnam is what caused issues with veterans.
Why? It's a job. Chosen voluntarily (usually), with known risks. Never mind the propaganda part that they are dying for a "world we live in". How a soldier dying for some war with dubious morality is owed any "debt" is beyond me.
I submit that we owe others who died doing some kind of public good much more debt than some dude who was duped into sacrificing his life to gun down others for some made-up reason. It's really hard to find any soldier who died for a good cause for most of the past century actually.
Amongst Netanyahu's corruption charges is that he and his wife used taxpayer money to rent a celebrity chef. Imagine expanding a genocide to WW3 because you wanted to escape accountability for stealing public money to pay for some overpriced dinner...
(This is my all time favourite poem though)
We've reverted the title. But also re-upped the post, because about half of this thread is surprisingly good.
--
Onward, Christian soldiers! Duty's way is plain:
Slay your Christian neighbors, or by them be slain.
Pulpiteers are spouting effervescent swill,
God above is calling you to rob and rape and kill,
All your acts are sanctified by the Lamb on high;
If you love the Holy Ghost, go murder, pray and die.
--
Onward, Christian soldiers, rip and tear and smite!
Let the gentle Jesus, bless your dynamite.
Splinter skulls with shrapnel, fertilize the sod;
Folks who do not speak your tongue, deserve the curse of God.
Smash the doors of every home, pretty maidens seize;
Use your might and sacred right to treat them as you please.
--
Onward, Christian soldiers! Eat and drink your fill;
Rob with bloody fingers, Christ OK's the bill.
Steal the farmer's savings, take their grain and meat;
Even though the children starve, the Saviour's bums must eat.
Burn the peasant's cottages, orphans leave bereft;
In Jehovah's holy name, wreak ruin right and left.
--
and so on: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Songs_of_the_Workers_(9th_edi...
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori"
Imagine they call a war but no one shows up.
Young people are especially vulnerable to brainwashing. Do everything you can to explain to them that they will dying to protect the powerful elite.