It’s hard to find an anti-war poem written before the First World War. But after that War to End All Wars—and no doubt influenced by its 20 million civilian and military deaths and the horrors of poison gas and trench warfare — anti-war poems became the norm, and remain so to this day.

Probably the most well-known British war poem written before World War One is Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade (1854), which describes a minor battle, lasting less than an hour, that took place within the larger Crimean War. In that battle, British cavalrymen (see above), wielding lances and sabers, were ordered to charge into a small valley and destroy (or “rescue”) the Russian artillery at the end of the valley. (No one seems exactly sure what the purpose of the attack was.) Unfortunately, there were Russian cannons on the heights on either side of the valley.

Tennyson read an account of the battle in a newspaper and came up with these familiar opening lines:

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Those six hundred soldiers turned out to be cannon fodder. Military intelligence was faulty, and officers misinterpreted orders along the chain of command. The Light Brigade should never have charged down the valley. Tennyson glosses over that fatal error (“someone had blundered”) but instead focuses our attention on the heroism of the soldiers who obediently follow the botched orders.

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.

Some of the cavalrymen actually make it to the end of the mile-long valley, where they overrun the cannons and then turn to slash at the cannoneers. If they had a purpose, they seem to have forgotten it. They do nothing with the artillery.

Then they have to get back out of the valley, with the cannons firing at them from both sides again. Of the 600 soldiers who entered the valley, almost half were shot up or killed outright. There were also 375 horses killed.

The final lines are patriotic and stirring:

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

Now let’s move forward about 60 years, which will take us from the Victorian Era to the First World War, to consider Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est. No gallant cavalry here, no spurs, handsome steeds, or sabers. Owen’s poem opens with gritty images of bloody soldiers, “drunk with fatigue,” on a forced march away from the battle.

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 into the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines [mortar shells] that dropped behind.

Owen’s image of retreating soldiers always reminds me of Bill Mauldin’s famous cartoon of bedraggled WWII soldiers. The ironic cutline for the cartoon to the right reads: “Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners.”

In both Mauldin’s cartoon and Owen’s poem, a bitter irony arises out of the vast difference between pretty words and terrible reality.

Back to Dulce et Decorum Est. Owen now moves to a description of the effects of the poison gas attack.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering 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.

Now begins Owen’s magnificent conclusion, which consists of two long dependent clauses that introduce Owen’s final irony-laden main clause.

If in some smothering dreams you too could walk
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. . . .
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.

The “old lie” is usually translated thus: “Sweet and fitting it is to die for your country.” After Owen’s description of the face of a man choking and screaming from the effects of poison gas, whose corpse is then piled on a wagon, I’m pretty sure that more ironic words than those have never been written.

Two ways of writing about war: In Tennyson’s poem, we look down, as if from a height, as the bloodless (in the poet’s retelling anyway) action unfolds. In Owen’s poem, we’re down there in the mud with the foot soldiers, lame and exhausted, their boots filled with blood.

Wilfred Owen was killed in action a week before the war’s end.