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 gas-shells dropping
softly 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.
Counter-
Attack
BY  SI EG FR IE D
S AS SO ON
We’d gained our first
objective hours before
While dawn broke like a
face with blinking
eyes,
Pallid, unshaven and
thirsty, blind with
smoke.
Things seemed all right
at first. We held their
line,
With bombers posted,
Lewis guns well
placed,
And clink of shovels
deepening the shallow
trench.
The place was rotten
with dead; green
clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled
and grovelled along the
saps
And trunks, face
downward, in the
sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden
sand-bags loosely
filled;
And naked sodden While posturing giants “O Christ, they’re
buttocks, mats of hair, dissolved in drifts of coming at us!” Bullets
Bulged, clotted heads smoke. spat,
slept in the plastering He crouched and And he remembered his
slime. flinched, dizzy with rifle ... rapid fire ...
And then the rain began, galloping fear, And started blazing
—the jolly old rain! Sick for escape,— wildly ... then a bang
  loathing the strangled Crumpled and spun him
A yawning soldier knelt horror sideways, knocked him
against the bank, And butchered, frantic out
Staring across the gestures of the dead. To grunt and wriggle:
morning blear with   none heeded him; he
fog; An officer came choked
He wondered when the blundering down the And fought the flapping
Allemands would get trench: veils of smothering
busy; “Stand-to and man the gloom,
And then, of course, they fire step!” On he Lost in a blurred
started with five-nines went ... confusion of yells and
Traversing, sure as fate, Gasping and bawling, groans ...
and never a dud. “Fire-step ... counter- Down, and down, and
Mute in the clamour of attack!” down, he sank and
shells he watched them Then the haze lifted. drowned,
burst Bombing on the right Bleeding to death. The
Spouting dark earth and Down the old sap: counter-attack had
wire with gusts from machine-guns on the failed.
hell, left;
And stumbling figures
looming out in front.