alt Hacker NewsDulce et Decorum Est (1921)
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Sharing my beloved ancient Chinese poem
山坡羊·潼关怀古 张养浩
峰峦如聚，波涛如怒，山河表里潼关路。望西都，意踌躇。 伤心秦汉经行处，宫阙万间都做了土。兴，百姓苦；亡，百姓苦。
Tune: “Sheep on the Hillside” —Tong Pass
Zhang Yanghao
Translated by Wayne Schlepp
Peaks as if massed,
Waves that look angry,
Along the mountains and the river lies the road to Tong Pass.
I look to the West Capital,
My thoughts unsettled.
Here, where the Qin and Han armies passed, I lament
The ten thousand palaces, all turned to dust.
Kingdoms rise,
The people suffer;
Kingdoms fall,
The people suffer.
In the 1990s, in the UK, my secondary school English teacher, who had Shakespearian actor vibes and wore dark tweed trousers and a plain white shirt—imagine Patrick Stewart if you may—brought this poem to life in my class by vividly reenacting a soldier dying from mustard gas poisoning by falling onto a desk and flailing about in front of the stunnned students sitting at it. I've never forgotten the closing line since.
I remember reading this as part of GCSE English, unfortunately the school system in the UK makes poetry dry and uninspiring. In terms of anti-war poems I prefer "The Box" by Kendrew Lascelles.
Just as an FYI, if anyone is into reading some good poems, I'd recommend "Good Poems", an anthology edited by Garrison Keillor. It's a great book to start reading poetry.
I had a friend who was reading it, and she loaned it to me, and it got me much more into poetry. I read the intro and was hooked. The whole series is pretty good, too.
The Zombies recorded "Butcher's Tale" [1][2], which I believe is a derivative of this but good in its own right.
My French language teacher at one college or other told me a story once. I might be getting some of the details wrong, so forgive me. But here goes:
In 1914 or thereabouts, his grandfather, a young French man, had just graduated from lycée or whatever and celebrated by backpacking around Europe, staying in youth hostels, riding trains, etc. He drank a lot of alcohol, made a lot of new friends, and generally had a great time.
In Germany, he wandered into a pub, encountered some friendly Germans, and joined them at a table. One drink turned into three, or five, or six, and the young Frenchman started attempting to speak the German spoken by his new friends. Perhaps he had a gift for languages, perhaps he'd picked up a little through some other means, perhaps the disinhibitory effect of alcohol helped his short-term recall for syntax and semantics.
Either way, the result was the same - the young Frenchman climbed up onto a table and made a brief, impromptu speech in German, addressed to his new friends, full of affection, extolling the virtues of modernity, goodwill and brotherhood, etc.
The rest of the pub was absolutely _alarmed_ by the young Frenchman's grasp of German. There was no way, they thought, that he could speak German so well. He must be a spy. The police were called, and he was thrown in jail.
Then the war broke out, and returning the young man to France was not anyone's concern. He spent the war locked up in Germany.
I can repeat that story, but I can't personally vouch for it. It's hearsay three or four times removed. It's a funny story, a little awful, but he's free in the end. Everything worked out.
But the awful punchline is something I do tend to believe - that his grandfather was the only survivor of all of the young men from his graduating class. Every other one died in the war.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xy0htPZZPs [2] https://genius.com/The-zombies-butchers-tale-western-front-1...
Owen died 7 days before the end of the war. A highly fictionalised but very evocative account of Owen, Sassoon, Hughes and the Craiglockhart medical facility that Owen stayed at (recuperating from PTSD) is in Pat Barker's 'Regeneration" Trilogy
"As under a green sea, I saw him drowning."
Fortunately, at least in my time, this was part of the curriculum in UK schools, and we had an exceptional English teacher. Like one of the other commenters here, I'm a science and numbers man, but can recite this poem still. Perhaps it was particularly memorable as I have an ancestor who occupies Sanctuary Wood as a consequence of a gas shell.
While we're sharing anti-war songs/poetry, I like And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda (originally written by Eric Bogle, but I personally like the Pogues' version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKURhqmSLmM
It's interesting to compare Owen's and Brooke's poetry (and even Sassoon's). Owen had lived through it all from '15 to '18, with some detours, and probably even as a patriot saw war for what it was. Brooke never really got that dose of realism; putting out his jingoistic cant until dying in 1915, before even seeing a war. Owen was a better poet, Brooke appealed to schoolboys.
Powerful poem.
I studied it in school as did my children at their school, decades later.
They also studied the Caesar' savage Gallic Wars ( in English and in Latin ) and Thucydides History of the Peloponsesian War.
Thucydides is essential reading these days.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/opinion/america-china-tru...
[Not the overall point of the poem, but] yet for all that, it turns out chemical weapons aren't even that useful: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
We had to memorize this back in grade school. It still gives me shivers every time I read it.
"Wo alle Straßen enden" is an German marching song. The video has WWI footage showing the reality of the trenches.
Henry Newbolt's Vitai Lampada https://net.lib.byu.edu/english/wwi/influences/vitai.html Captures a sense of duty against the realities of war.
Randall Jarrell's "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57860/the-death-of-th... Is a much grimmer perspective.
Richard Grenier captured the truth for civil society: "As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." (h/t https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/07/rough-men/)
All we have of freedom, all we use or know – This our fathers bought for us long and long ago. Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw— Leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the Law. Rudyard Kipling, The Old Issue, 1899 https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/kipling/old_issue/
About 150 Iranian sailors drowned this morning, far from home, not a clear and present danger to anyone, no war declared on them by Congress, nor sanctioned by the UN. We could have demanded a surrender but instead we blew them up.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/mar/04/iran-war-...
Gallipoli is a good movie that touches on this complex subject.
The gas victim scene is harrowing. But what haunts me even more is the men without boots, marching with bloody feet.
Inspiration for the New Wave song of the same name from the seventies. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JeJuEqCtzKg
The ceremony, pomp and reverence we pay to soldiers and the fallen are all aimed at making sure the young remain willing to do an ugly job at affordable prices. For every poem like this there is a parade, monument, wreath-laying ceremony, or the modern equivalent of young girls handing white feathers to young boys.
It seems ungrateful to view it this way. We owe a real debt to the soldiers who died for the world we live in. It seems like we should owe them respect. However, we need to recognize that this kind of respect, while indeed owed, is also sometimes abused by politicians to field armies at affordable prices in the service of their own greed and vanity.
If, "War is the continuation of politics by other means", then we must demand better policy from our politicians than what we're seeing today.
I was bothered by the fact that the English poem doesn't scan correctly.
This prompted me to look up the ode, and I can't figure out the Latin meter. Does anyone know?
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
You've got to die of something; so you might as well die for something but your country isn't the best thing to die for.
The problem with your country (at least the vast majority of countries) is that it doesn't care about you. It's just too big to care. It has almost nothing to do with you.
I can't wrap my mind around the fact that people feel some affiliation with their country. For the vast majority of people, the relationship is akin to an abusive boyfriend/girlfriend who takes your money and ignores your existence.
It only reciprocates for a tiny number of people at the very top; everyone else is delusional.
The slots at the top are extremely limited. The country should never be the focus; people should engage with local community instead. The country can only be appreciated in the context of a local community.
For modern readers we might need an update to the old lie about how it is sweet and fitting to die for an entirely different country than your own. One you have probably never even visited.
"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"
This reminds me of what could be considered a complementary poem/song, by John F. Kendrick:
--
Onward, Christian soldiers! Duty's way is plain:
Slay your Christian neighbors, or by them be slain.
Pulpiteers are spouting effervescent swill,
God above is calling you to rob and rape and kill,
All your acts are sanctified by the Lamb on high;
If you love the Holy Ghost, go murder, pray and die.
--
Onward, Christian soldiers, rip and tear and smite!
Let the gentle Jesus, bless your dynamite.
Splinter skulls with shrapnel, fertilize the sod;
Folks who do not speak your tongue, deserve the curse of God.
Smash the doors of every home, pretty maidens seize;
Use your might and sacred right to treat them as you please.
--
Onward, Christian soldiers! Eat and drink your fill;
Rob with bloody fingers, Christ OK's the bill.
Steal the farmer's savings, take their grain and meat;
Even though the children starve, the Saviour's bums must eat.
Burn the peasant's cottages, orphans leave bereft;
In Jehovah's holy name, wreak ruin right and left.
--
and so on: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Songs_of_the_Workers_(9th_edi...
[dead]
I don't think modern soldiers feel like they own their country.
I much prefer "Imagine" by Beatles.
Imagine they call a war but no one shows up.
Young people are especially vulnerable to brainwashing. Do everything you can to explain to them that they will dying to protect the powerful elite.
There's additional context here that makes this poem more powerful in my opinion.
It's a direct response to Jessie Pope, an English poet and propagandist who would write poems like "Who's for the Game?", implying that the great war was all a bit of fun and those who didn't want to go were cowards.
Owen had actually been in the trenches, and tragically died only a few days before the armistice.