‘Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud’

“War does not determine who is right–only who is left.”

 —BERTRAND RUSSELL

By Alex P. Vidal

WHILE the world is agog over the coronavirus or COVID-19 and the media is full of sad and depressing stories about the mayhem caused by the pandemic, let me share an impressive poem written by Wilfred Owen, the greatest writer of war poetry in the English language.

The poem is mentioned in the Aspects of Western Civilization (Volume II) Problems and Sources of History (fourth edition) Chapter 6 on The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era, compiled by Perry M. Rogers. 

Owen wrote out of his intense personal experience as a soldier and wrote with unrivaled power of the physical, moral and psychological trauma of the First World War. 

All of his great war poems on which his reputation rests were written in a mere 15 months.

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From the age of 19, Owen wanted to become a poet and immersed himself in poetry, being especially impressed by Keats and Shelley. 

He was working in France, close to the Pyrenees, as a private tutor when the First World War broke out. 

At this time he was remote from the war and felt completely disconnected from it too.

Even when he visited the local hospital with a doctor friend and examined, at close quarters, the nature of the wounds of soldiers who were arriving from the Western Front, the war still appeared to him as someone else’s story, according to The War Poetry website. 

Eventually he began to feel guilty of his inactivity as he read copies of The Daily Mail which his mother sent him from England. 

He returned to England, and volunteered to fight on October 21, 1915.

He trained in England for over a year and enjoyed the impression he made on people as he walked about in public wearing his soldier’s uniform.

Owen was sent to France on the last day of 1916, and within days was enduring the horrors of the front line. 

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Here’s Owen’s famous poem:

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 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.

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KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. Does sound go on forever? No sound lasts forever as a sound. The waves that carry the sound become weaker and weaker, and finally our human ears can hear them no longer. Nor is there any scientific instrument, no matter how delicate, that can record sounds after a certain length of time as passed.

THE 24-CARAT GOLD. Pure gold is known, in the jewelry trade, as 24-carat gold. This is too soft a metal for ordinary wear and tear, so a harder metal, generally copper, is alloyed with gold. If the alloy has 18 parts of gold and 6 parts of another metal, we call it 18-carat gold; if it has 14 parts of gold and 10 of another metal, we call it 14-carat gold, and so on.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. We hear better on water than on sand. Sound is composed of waves that pass through the air. These waves are broken up and interrupted when they strike against solid obstacles. On land, sound-waves usually can not travel very far without striking against houses, or trees, or mountains or some other objects that stand in their path.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)