It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. At least, that is the translation of the Latin epitaph at the end of Wilfred Owen’s seminal poem of the same name, which goes: Dulce et Decorum est/ Pro patria mori. It is taken from a line from the Roman poet Horace’s Odes and is contested in Owen’s poem as ‘the old lie’. Readers familiar with the horrors contained in the poem know he was not drawing from the imagination, for the poet, who was killed one week before Armistice, saw and heard everything. Everything except the chiming bells of victory which rang joyously as his mother read the news of her son’s death in a telegram. He was 25 years old.
More than 100 years later, when young Australian men are asked on the street in Melbourne and Sydney if they would stand up to defend their country, many say they would not. Many say the country is not worth fighting for, they value their life too much, or that they would simply flee to New Zealand. Listening to such responses makes one wonder: What changed? Didn’t young men scramble to enlist once? Didn’t they lie about their age? Yes, they did – once. But what changed? The country, the men, or both?
In his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens recalled how he never did ‘breathe the pure serene’ until he encountered Owen’s poetry. The words of Dulce et Decorum Est, went off like a ‘landmine’ under his preconception of history and empire. For Hitchens, the moment a classmate in school ‘stumbled his bored and boring way’ through Owen’s poem, at first outraged him, but he found he could not act for his eyes were clouded with stinging tears. Hitchens could recite the poem perfectly and did so multiple times in front of an audience. He would warn his audience beforehand, as he told readers of his memoir, that he could not do so without a catch in his throat, for it is the kind of poetry that came from an experience many wish not to have in their lifetime, rather than a lifetime of experience. It is the kind of poetry which fills us with a mix of sorrow and gratitude that is as everlasting.
Owen, who was perhaps the most exceptional of the English poets to come out of the Great War, became the voice of a martyred generation. During his life, Owen had been a private language teacher with just five poems to his name, but after his death, he went on to become one of the most well-known and adored poets that emerged from the war. For him, the experience of the trenches was something surreal, with the line between dream and nightmare blurred by shellshock, hypothermia, and insomnia. The knowledge of his fate only compounds the power of his poem. Originally, Owen ironically dedicated his poem to the pro-war poetess Jessie Pope, whose patriotic stanzas he, along with some other war-weary soldier poets, found distasteful. Indeed, Owen’s, and the poetry of many others, shaped the anti-war sentiment. War, since the ancient Greeks and Romans, was glorified. Now, modern societies invariably abhor and condemn it. And yet, this strange symptom of humanity continues.
Today, the steady, assured slaughter of young men continues to blaze. In Eastern Europe there are frostbitten forests and dry, dead steppes and plains littered with their bones. Meanwhile, there is still no end in sight for the conflict in the Middle East, despite the most recent ceasefire. We have seen the hellish brutality which triggered one conflict in a single day, and the sustained pressure over years which preludes the other. The response to the wars, which has taken many ugly forms, has received almost as much coverage as the bombing and bloodshed. The reaction to the conflicts is doubtlessly reflective of the accessible coverage of the wars. In the age of modern media, only by turning away do we avoid being caught up in the gunfire. And yet, there is not much poetry going around, unless you count the chanted slogans.
There is no doubt war is a horrific and dreadful thing. It is also an inescapable and sometimes necessary thing. Which is why war must be talked about. It must be examined, questioned, written about, and journalised. Among Owen’s papers was a short introduction to his writing which would become the preface of his posthumously published pile of poems. He wrote that true poets have a duty to be truthful, which could mean a poet ought not to spare the reader from what the poet means to express. He said: ‘All a poet can do today is warn.’ Published two years after the end of the Great War, he warned: ‘This book is not concerned with poetry. The subject of it is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are not to this generation… They may be to the next. That is why the true poets must be truthful.’
In a recent poll conducted by the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), almost half of young Australians said they would refuse to fight for their country. In fact, 48 per cent would rather flee Australia, compared to the 27 per cent of 18-24 year olds who would stay and fight. The remaining quarter was unsure. Among all Australians, only 46 per cent would stay. ‘But it is not surprising,’ Daniel Wild, the deputy executive director at the IPA, said, ‘given that all you will hear from the elites and the political class is that Australia is an immoral, racist, and illegitimate country.’ Wild said this was because a growing number of young Australians had become ‘so ashamed’ of themselves and their country. To this, one might ask, why do so many people seek to live here? Indeed, Australia is in need for a ‘cultural rearmament’ if we ever hope to be steadfast on the occasion our horizons become populated with the bows of enemy battleships. With young Australians now convinced there is nothing worth fighting for, that Australia has a dreadful past, and deserves no future – this is the new lie.
War journalist and writer Douglas Murray, who recently covered the conflict from the rubble of Gaza, wrote in his essay Why we now know the pity of war that Owen’s greatest achievement was to impart, more than a century on, the hell he witnessed. Many of us can only imagine what it was like, but through his poetry he showed what has been discovered cannot be forgotten, because what we have learned ‘cannot be unlearned’. And yet, despite wars being written about and documented for millennia, the lessons learned from war only inform our tactics in the next one.
War is hell, and although Owen was killed just before he could hear the bells of victory, which heralded the dawn of a new hope, one cannot help but wonder that if he had dodged the machine-gunner’s bullet and lived on with his remaining comrades, would he have repudiated his poem? Out of the mucky and tormented trenches, Wilfred Owen would have joined the great writers of the Lost Generation; Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot, but instead his spirit lives on in his poetry that warns us that the next war, which is always on the horizon, does not end in a sweet and fitting death, anymore. If he had lived, would this exceptional poet’s anguish have turned to consolation? If he had the chance to hear the bells, would he have embraced his mother and said, ‘Yes, it was not in vain?’
For Australia, such a premier nation only exists if its countrymen see its value and defend it, as our glorious diggers have done before. The next generation of Australians who doubt their country is indeed the ‘lucky’ one, ought to take a moment to reflect, as we reflect each year on Remembrance Day. Australia is a miracle, a bastion of prosperity and a land shimmering with opportunity. And it is worth fighting for. This, I am sure, is no lie.
