the fury and the mire example, an illustration of a man choking to death on poison gas; that followed by
amoralitas,a moral coda of passionate indignation.
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.^3The victim’s fate is pitiful, but to my ear the poetry is in the controlled fury of the
final twelve-line sentence, rather than in the pity.
Almost twenty years later, a young Cambridge Communist, John Cornford, set
off for the Spanish Civil War, carrying the pistol his father had carried through the
Great War and, in his head, Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. We know that because
his ‘Letter from Aragon’ takes its structure from Owen’s poem. First, theexemplum
(or, to be exact, threeexempla):
This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.
We buried Ruiz in a new pine coffin,
But the shroud was too small and his washed feet stuck out.
Thestinkofhiscorpsecamethroughthecleanpineboards
And some of the bearers wrapped handkerchiefs round their faces.
Death was not dignified.
We hacked a ragged grave in the unfriendly earth
And fired a ragged volley over the grave.
You could tell from our listlessness, no one much missed him.
This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.
There is no poison gas and no H.E.
But when they shelled the other end of the village
And the streets were choked with dust
Women came screaming out of the crumbling houses,
Clutched under one arm the naked rump of an infant.
I thought: how ugly fear is.
This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.
Our nerves are steady; we all sleep soundly.(^3) Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, inThe Complete Poems and Fragments,i:The Poems,ed.Jon
Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University Press, 1983), 140.