Tomorrow is Remembrance/Veterans/Armistice Day and by any name it bears observing. The horror of war is unimaginable to any who have not experienced it and yet we must remember what happened as best we can. November the 11th was originally called Armistice Day and honored the dead of "The War to End all Wars" of 1914-1918. In the US, it has since been turned into Veterans Day. I have never been comfortable with this. While living veterans certainly deserve honor, this change has always seemed like grave-robbing; the living appropriating something that was meant for the dead. In the worst cases, the day has sometimes become a time of macho faux patriotic fervor, instead of the condemnation of war that it is supposed to be.

What gets me is the pointlessness of it all and how we seemed doomed to repeat history over and over. My own island has likely never fully recovered from the massacre of her youth at Beaumont-Hamel on the 1st of July, AD 1916. For NOTHING. Likewise, the poet Wilfred Owen was killed senselessly in the waning days of the war, at the age of 25. This man was younger than me when he died. Again, for NOTHING. The war was over - a cease-fire set for the following week.

You owe it to yourself to read Wilfred Owen's famous work and think about what he could have done had he lived - what he should have done. And how much emptier the world was without him. The poem is called Dulce et Decorum est and I'm always open to discussion about it with anyone.


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 tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped 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.