Dulce Et Decorum Est

When we were in Ft. Wayne recently, David and I went to see No Country for Old Men and 3:10 to Yuma. This was exciting for us because we hadn't been to a movie since our wedding anniversary, May 20th. While waiting for 3:10 to start, the theater was playing a music video by 3 Doors Down. This video was interesting because it was promotional video for the national guard. The band starts out singing this song on some barren landscape and then moves to show reenactment footage from famous American battles along with the national guard's bread and butter- shots of people looking cool while jumping out of helicopters. I turned to David and told him that the band had just become the modern day Horace. Horace, or course, fought in the Roman army and then later went on to be placed firmly under the patronage(and thumb) of Augustus by way of Maecenas. He wrote some patriotic poetry in support of Augustus' moral reforms. Probably one of Horace's most famous works is his ode in which he says, "Dulce et decorum est pro partia mori", or "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country".

I thought about this line for a couple of days and it inevitably led me to re-read Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est". Owen was a British soldier who fought and died in WWI. IN the poem Owen writes about the horrors of WWI:

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.

I never knew much about WWI except that a lot of unstable monarchies were fighting, at least nominally, because Franz Ferdinand was shot. Well, I checked out a book on WWI last Friday and I'm almost done with it. I was aware that many men died during these battles, but it is overwhelming to me to read statistics like 250,000 people died during a single, albeit, long battle. It guess it's all the more overwhelming because it never seemed that any of the major belligerents had clear war aims. To say that thousands of men died in vain is an understatement.

I'm particularly interested in learning about the disintegration of monarchies, resulting revolutions,war tactics at the beginning of the modern age, and documented cases of the mental stresses of "The Great War".

I remember reading Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way in grad school and thinking that I should learn more about WWI. Now that I'm out of school I actually have time to do so.