DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Bent Double, like old beggards 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-shed. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, gas shells 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 floundring 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 fling him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face-,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sim:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obsceneas 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 Lei: DULCE ET DECORUM EST
PRO PATRIA MORI
The poem written by Wilfred Owen at the battle of Somme in my view far surperior then Fladers fields. Although that poem is widley known and made the poppies an international symbol. This poem by Wilson describes the total madness of this war in all its gruwel details.
Escpecially the sentence Gas! Gas! Quick boys! and the part where the blood is gargling from the froth crupted lungs is something that is a chilling account of something that really happend
day by day, hour by hour at the front. He wrote some other fine poems, but this one is definitely his best and most gripping. In his letters to his mother he frankly wrote about the things he
experienced at the front (or as he called it: IN the front...)
Wilfred Owen died, 25 years old in 1918 just days before the war ended...
When the Germans conquered almost all of Belgium in 1914, there was only one thing left to stop them: to flood the land at the IJzer river system near Ieper.
The heavy artillery
and the soldiers were stuck in the mud and so 4 years of trench war started. Ieper was to remain battle front until the every end in 1918
Both sides winning a couple of meters now and then at the cost of tens of thousands lives. Here the Germans first used gas - which affected the lungs of the soldiers.
Every evening The last Post is played in Ieper precisely at 20:00. Always there are relatives and regiments present. When we were there I guess teher were a couple of hundred people
present.
