Poetry and war

A friend of mine told me over the weekend that she missed my poetry posts. (If you are nostalgic, you can go back to any posts from April for the pedantry.) But that comment, and today’s news from Iraq made me think of one of my favorites: Horace’s Ode 3.2–the famous “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” ode–“It is sweet and fitting to die for your country.”

Now I’m certain that Horace was being ironic. In fact, I wrote a pretty good paper about it once in college. But, of course, that hasn’t stopped the guys who start the wars quoting him out of context for the last 2000 years. We have, luckily, the other poets and artists to interpret for us.

Here’s Hemingway’s take, for example: “They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”

And here is English poet Wilfred Owen:

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 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 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.

Read that last line again–the part about the “old Lie,” and think of how we got into Iraq. Think of that in the light of the stories out of England recently in which it was revealed in Parliamentary memos that the American government knew damn well they were lying about Saddam’s weapons.

Add that to the lies Rumsfeld baldly told to the questioning American soldier about why they were sent to Iraq with unarmored Humvees and inadequate body armor.

Think then of Horace and Hemingway and Owen’s imagery.

Five Americans were killed over the weekend, four of them by road side bombs that blew apart their bodies, which were shielded by little more than the leather armor worn by Roman soldiers in Horace’s time.

Think of the pink froth of those boys’ last breaths gurgling from their perforated chests and screaming lips.

And then think if you would send a dog to die like that.

Rumsfeld would.