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The War to End All Wars
By Townie 76
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.
Remembrance Day
As we celebrate this Veterans Day let us remember what it is called in the United Kingdom and Canada Remembrance Day. For US in the United States, World War I is but a vague memory—something our Grand Fathers (in my case!) fought in. It was a war in which the United States participation was but a year and half. It was a war in which the United States turned the tide and without whom the Allies could have not won; but we were not the dominate partner—France and the United Kingdom were; nor did we provide the dominate military leader of that conflict—Field Marshall Foch was the Supreme Allied Commander. For the United States World War I was short war, fought for the right reasons, a war in which many Americans died and were maimed; but when compared with the sacrifices of the United Kingdom and France they pale in comparison.
If one should visit either Canada or the United Kingdom at this time of year one will be struck by the fact that everyone is wearing a red poppy on their lapel or collar. This is not an obligatory custom but rather a sense of responsibility that they wear these poppies. Just as impressive as the wearing of poppies is the ceremonies of Remembrance, which occurs in every city, town, shire, and village. Some occur at the Church, but most occur at the monument to those who gave their lives in the Great War. The ceremonies honor a generation who died in a war which has left an indelible mark on the psyche, even today, of the United Kingdom and Canada.
Let us consider just one battle in that Great War; the Battle of the Somme fought between July 1916 and November of that same year. On the first day of the Battle, the British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and troops of the Empire went over the top, took back about a quarter mile of land and lost over fifty thousand casualties both killed and wounded. When the battle concluded in November, the British Forces had advanced no further and they had suffered over a million casualties; 400,000 who had died on the fields of Flanders.
On this the ninetieth anniversary of the War to End All Wars, let us pause for a moment to think about the sacrifice which the Commonwealth Nations and France made until that day when the United States showed up to help end this war. My words will not and cannot describe or capture the emotions of that war and its effect upon the mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers of those who fought on the side of the Allies. Let me leave you with these words from perhaps the greatest of the British War Poets from World War I. The verse is not heroic, as in the words of Kipling or Tennyson, but rather realistic, brutal, and stark.
Dulce et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
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.
From http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19389
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Comments
"Sweet and honorable it is to die for one's country."
Or I guess the Latin is something like "...for the country to die."
Either way, when I memorized this poem at 14 or 15, I always thought of it as an anti-war poem. Nonetheless, the visual representations and vivid wording have always stuck with me.
Thanks.
Well, it IS an anti-war poem. It says flat-out that it is NOT honorable to die for one's country, or at least that there's no honor in dying in the sort of conditions under which soldiers so often died in WWI. The poem is part of the larger trend of Modernism, which lamented the ways that industrialism, mass culture, and so on seemed to be sucking the marrow out of life on all fronts. You know--instead of artisans experiencing the individual satisfaction of crafting goods by hand, you had factory workers who endured the drudgery of the assembly line, that sort of thing. And instead of gaining the heroic honor of dying in old-fashioned combat, you were simply killed en masse by bombs or gas, often without ever really having a chance to "fight" in any traditional sense. So the poem might not be an antiwar poem in the sense of being pacifist, but it's very much a protest against what war had by that time become.
So the poem might not be an antiwar poem in the sense of being pacifist, but it's very much a protest against what war had by that time become.
That's very well put.
Two other poems typify my feelings on Remembrance Day: LCol John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" which every Canadian schoolchild of my generation had to memorize at some point, and lines of which grace the back of our ten dollar bill, and Rupert Brooke's "The Dead," which is less known but equally powerful, to my mind:
BLOW out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.
The opening lines are engraved upon the Memorial Arch at the Royal Military College of Canada, which is where I first saw them, and they were what inspired me to learn the rest of the poem.
I think all three poems, taken together, cover my spectrum of feeling about the day.
In 1916, the year of the Somme, Newfoundland was not part of Canada but a separate British colony (it joined Canada in 1949). The Newfoundland Regiment at the start of the battle:
'The casualties sustained on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme totalled 57,470, of which 19,240 were fatal. The Newfoundland Regiment Battalion ration strength on June 30, 1916, was 1044 all ranks, including administrative staff and attached personnel. Actual fighting strength was about 929 all ranks, of whom twenty six officers and 772 other ranks deployed into the trenches. A further officer and 33 other ranks were attached to the Brigade Mortar and Machine Gun Companies while 14 officers and 83 other ranks were held back as reserve and for special duties.
So far as can be ascertained, 22 officers and 758 other ranks were directly involved in the advance. Of these, all the officers and slightly under 658 other ranks became casualties, but exact figures are not available as casualties were reported for the day as a whole. Of the 780 men who went forward only about 110 survived unscathed, of whom only sixty eight were available for roll call the following day. The Battalion's War Diary on July 7 states that on July 1 the overall casualties for the Battalion were 14 officers and 296 other ranks killed, died of wounds or missing believed killed, and that 12 officers and 362 other ranks were wounded, a total of 684 all ranks out of a fighting strength of about 929. About 14 of the wounded subsequently died from their wounds. Afterward, the Divisional Commander was to write of the Newfoundlanders effort: "It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour, and its assault failed of success because dead men can advance no further."'
Canada's just retired Chief of the Defence Staff, General Rick Hillier, is from Newfoundland.
Mark
Ottawa
In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army
In Flanders Fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
On Remembrance Day in Canada:
I spent 3 years in Alberta from 1968 to 1971 as a "Landed Immigrant"(Resident Alien)
On Remembrance Day at 1100 hours Ottawa Time, The Entire Country Came To A Stop as the Governor-General and Prime Minister laid a wreath at the Tomb of The Unknown. The Entire Country.
As a Lad of 14 the first time I saw this on the CBC, I was speechless.
According to Instapinch it still happens. Canadian Casualties on a percentage of force were among the highest in the Great War. And in the Prairie Provinces a lot of Regiments took horrible casualties. Like the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, The Loyal Edmonton Regiment and the Southern Alberta Light Horse.
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"Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge..."
I'm not sure why, but that line makes this one of my favorite war poems.
I love the poetry of empire and war, before the art was hijacked by stoners and pacifists. The British War poets of WWI were some of the best -- but I can't help but to hold a special place in my heart for Tennyson (note the quote in the banner!) and Kipling.