stanza begins in exactly the same way that the
first stanza began, with the denial of the fact of
death. But when in the second line of the final
stanza the narration changes from first-person
plural to first-person singular, there is a change.
On the night of his death this particular crewman
has a dream in which it seems for the first time
that deeper questions about the war—the pur-
pose of it all—start to appear. These are not
questions or issues that have come up for the
crewmen in their normal waking state of aware-
ness. But the questions may have been present
in the subconscious level of their minds, which
many would argue manifests in dreams. The peo-
ple who have been killed in the bombing raid on
the cities ask in one collective voice why they had
to die, and they also ask him, the individual air-
man who is dreaming of his own death, why he
had to die as well. Thus indirectly, in the form
of a question asked by someone else in a dream,
the airman is brought closer to reality, closer to
accepting not only the fact of his own imminent
death but also to asking, if somewhat belatedly,
why his death came upon him in the manner that
it did, what the purpose of it was.
The Cruelty and Injustice of War
The airmen who speak in the poem appear to
know nothing of the cause of the war or whether
it is a just war; they simply do what they are told
without understanding or question. They are
given the maps showing the enemy city they are
to bomb, and they do the job. They are neither
enthusiastic about their cause nor critical of it.
They do not swell with pride at the fact that
those who survive are awarded medals; on the
contrary, they seem indifferent to such things.
They resemble cogs in a machine, without the
power to evaluate or judge. The reader, however,
is left with a strong sense of the callousness and
cruelty of war, which is shown by the civilian
casualties in the bombing raids, the deaths of
the young airmen themselves, and the reduction
of human lives and deaths to statistics, as when,
for example, the official reports simply record
that casualties were low. The reader also sees the
cruel irony in the fact that the fliers whose luck
ran out now lie dead and anonymous alongside
the victims of the bombs they dropped. Death
makes no distinction between them. Only in the
final stanza do the participants in the war, both
killers and victims, begin to ask the questions
that might expose the futility, cruelty, and injus-
tice of the war, in which some are destined to die
through no fault or guilt of their own, and some,
selected apparently at random, are destined to
survive.Wasted Youth
The airmen themselves do not bemoan their
wasted youth, even though so many of them
are killed, but the reader does. The reader notes
that these crew members are barely out of high
school, as the last two lines of the first stanza
show. Their youth is also indicated by the fact
that they have little experience of death. This is
shown in line 10, in the examples they select of
other deaths they have up to now been exposed
to. It is a very limited list, understandably for
those so young who lack life experience. They
make another reference to their high school days
when they say they bombed the cities they had
read about in school. They had no firsthand
knowledge of these cities nor of anything else
beyond what the average eighteen- or nineteen-
year-old man might be expected to have. The
youth of the airmen gives a poignancy to the
poem, a sense that life is being cut off before its
natural time.American military cemetary and memorial(Julian
Herbert / Getty Images)Losses