Rear Guard & Dulce et Decorum
The nineteenth century was irrevocably swept away in a tide of mud and blood with the coming of World War I. "The Great War" lasted from 1914 through 1918. More than eight million soldiers lost their lives in the struggle between the Central Powers and the Allies. The old ideals of warfare fought by aristocrats and gentlemen vanished beneath gas attacks, trench warfare, and heavy artillery bombardments. Enlisted men would spend weeks in the most unbearable trenches of the front line. These trenches were the most treacherous place to be in the war. Many of the soldiers suffered from trench foot, starvation, dysentery, shell shock, and body lice and if these didn't get to them the mortar and gas attacks were sure to. World War I posters attracted men to enlist pledging honor, duty, and camaraderie, going back to the Latin saying that it is sweet and honorable to die for one's country. In times when battles were fought with daggers and swords this was true, but times change and with the innovation of tanks, machine guns, and artillery shells this is no longer justifiable. Many soldiers lost appendages, choked to death on their own intestines, or were made undistinguishable by the overpowering blast of a mortar. Humanity beg
Owen is a first hand witness to the war and therefore his vivid accounts are as close to real as can be provided. The conditions of the trenches in the war are unbearable. in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. [e]verything in the poem seems to exist only to show the falsity of this motto in modern warfare" (Hazo 367). As he wanders aimlessly through the trenches, noticing the horrid smell in the air, he asks assistance from a man lying on the floor, "[a]nd flashed his beam across the livid face / Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore / Agony dying hard ten days before; / And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound" (Sassoon lines 15-18). Dulce et Decorum Est is a "realistic record of the most disgusting side of war, which was meant to be, and even today still succeed in being, deeply disturbing to the reader" which discourage from the ignorant glorification of war (Draper page 228-9). The chlorine gas in World War I once taken in the soldiers began choking on the gas just as if they were drowning. The title of the poem is contrary to the images it creates which show that it in neither sweet nor honorable, but horrifying and appalling to die in war. touch not our imagination, but our senses" (Murry 386). Austin: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2000. The despair that the trenches cause leads him to step into enemy fire to a more honorable death.
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Acceptance Essays
