Pilgrimage of Poems: These who die like cattle

Wilfred Owen is probably the poet most widely associated with World War I. Unlike Mithridates—but very like millions of men between 1914 and 1918—he died young. He was 25 when he was killed in action by machine gun fire crossing the Sambre-Oise Canal on 4 November, 1918.

That was seven days before the cease-fire.

Owen had volunteered in 1915, and was sent to the Western Front as a second lieutenant with the Manchester Regiment. Between January and May 1917, he fell into a shell hole and suffered concussion and was hit by a mortar explosion (which killed his best friend). Following that incident, and after spending several days lying in a railway embankment, he was diagnosed with shellshock and sent to Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh.

Craiglockhart was the place you went if your wounds weren’t of the flesh.

That was where he met Siegfried Sassoon (I’ll get to him later this month) and began to distill his perspective on the war, eventually becoming a powerful voice decrying its criminal waste and futility.

Last year I gave you “Dulce et Decorum Est”, probably his most famous expression of that. This year, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

      Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

      Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,

      Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

      And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

      Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

      The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.