Tag: Dulce et Decorum Est

Recommended by Ricochet Members Created with Sketch. Gallant Cavalry Charges and Poison Gas

KentForrester
By KentForrester
KentForrester Moderator
I grew up in the 50s in the blue-collar city of Compton, California, just before it turned dangerous. I spent my youth in pool halls and bowling alleys. I had no interest in school. To make money, I delivered newspapers, set pins in the bowling alley, kept score, and even shined shoes in dive bars on Compton Boulevard. I was drafted into the Army in 1958 and spent 18 months in Germany, where I started thinking hard about what I wanted to do with my life. So I returned to Compton Junior College f… [more]
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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:

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