wilfred owen the difficulty we have in making sense of our implication in twentieth-century wars
(theallegedly futile ones and the necessary ones, the clinically executed—‘who
dares wins’—and the incompetent). Owen should be of less importance to us as a
historian than as a poet, a poet who did not just ‘tell us what war was like’ (and
just why do we still set so much store by this?) but who strived to connect feelings
about war and its negations with the values by which he lived his life.