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.
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.
We did the poem in secondary school as well. While we didn’t have the acting skills of your teacher, we deconstructed and reviewed each line and it really had a powerful impact on the class. The tortured helplessness of the dying soldier was a lasting memory.
Later, I thought that the job of a soldier wasn’t to die for their country but to make someone else die for theirs. Perhaps that more cynical view was influenced by the poem and the other war poets that we covered.
[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...
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
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...
There is a reason they put that into curriculum.
We had to memorize this back in grade school. It still gives me shivers every time I read it.
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
My personal favorite is the song from the movie (not the show, haven't watched) M.A.S.H.
Or, perhaps, Vera Lynn's "We'll meet again some sunny day".
These are good movies to rewatch, especially in these interesting times.
The Australians have some incredible anti-war music. Redgum's /I was only 19/ is brutal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UYDKxxQ50o
The recital by Christopher Eccleston is more dramatic.
There's an excellent In Our Time episode on Owen available from the BBC ([1], [2]) where Melvin Bragg gives an gentle yet chilling reading of the climax of the poem (about 29 minutes in). And like many IOT episodes, provides great context and detail eg on Jessie Pope, Sassoon, and so on.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001df48 [2] https://open.spotify.com/episode/2nd5iWVnNCWL2ulAVsSDLe
"Wo alle Straßen enden" is an German marching song. The video has WWI footage showing the reality of the trenches.
there's more movie clips than actual WWI footage in there
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/
We need our rough men and nuclear weapons because they have theirs. I think I would sleep deeper if no one had them.
World War 1 was not the kind of war that delivered freedom. It was more the kind that elites entered into without full regard of the costs.
An opinion that formed after the war, but not actually anchored in reality. None of the elite really wanted a war, some levels of the military did. Nicolas II raged against his generals that he did not want to mobilize and send men to their deaths. The German leadership didn't want a war, they thought it was inevitable but that they'd lose. The Austro-Hungarians definitely didn't want a war with Russia but did want to give the Serbs a black eye for the assassination in Sarajevo, and made a number of bad decisions. The British tried to stop the war and a number of politicians there wrote about the potential consequences before it happened.
In a way it's sadder than other conflicts: none of the participants entered the war for power or control, they all thought they were defending themselves. Plenty of people knew the human cost would be high. Events and fear and lack of fast communication just took over. And it set up the conditions for WW2 and probably the cold war.
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...
The gas victim scene is harrowing. But what haunts me even more is the men without boots, marching with bloody feet.
Gallipoli is a good movie that touches on this complex subject.
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-...
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.
War is the poor dying for the rich. The only way to pay respect to those who have died at the behest of the rich is to explicitly recognize who sent them, why they were sent, and to do everything we can to prevent it happening again.
And with "sometimes" we mean we cant remember the last time it didn't happen.
>sometimes abused by politicians to field armies at affordable prices in the service of their own greed and vanity.
After Khamenei death Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement that Russia is "against killing of the leaders of sovereign countries". Somehow they didn't mention nor regular citizens nor rank-and-file soldiers of sovereign countries.
In the Spanish series "El Cid" there is a nice depiction of how a battle and the whole war immediately ends once the king of one side is killed in that battle. Everybody just went back to their regular business.
A translation of saying in Russian, not sure whether it exists in English - "One's heroism is always a result of incompetency and idiotism of somebody else."
> After Khamenei death Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement that Russia is "against killing of the leaders of sovereign countries". Somehow they didn't mention nor regular citizens nor rank-and-file soldiers of sovereign countries.
Rich, coming from the state that sponsored more than a dozen assassination attempts on Zelenskyy. But russians get over this hypocrisy by not recognizing a country as sovereign, so it's fair game.
> We owe a real debt to the soldiers who died for the world we live in.
Why? It's a job. Chosen voluntarily (usually), with known risks. Never mind the propaganda part that they are dying for a "world we live in". How a soldier dying for some war with dubious morality is owed any "debt" is beyond me.
I submit that we owe others who died doing some kind of public good much more debt than some dude who was duped into sacrificing his life to gun down others for some made-up reason. It's really hard to find any soldier who died for a good cause for most of the past century actually.
"Voluntarily". I guess that word fits if being a cog in the capitalist machine is voluntary. Lots of US soldiers are poor kids with no prospects, the USA offers subsidized education and healthcare, but only after you put your body on the line to be shot at because the child-rapist-in-chief and a Fox News alcoholic wants to please their corrupt Israeli daddy...
Amongst Netanyahu's corruption charges is that he and his wife used taxpayer money to rent a celebrity chef. Imagine expanding a genocide to WW3 because you wanted to escape accountability for stealing public money to pay for some overpriced dinner...
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.
Seems a bit like an historically blinkered statement. There's a long history of countries militarily supporting their allies; there's nothing "modern" about this.
Most of the countries in WWI - which this poem is about - entered the war because of existing alliances, not because they were personally affected by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
While the US was indeed attacked by the Japanese in WWII, they could have focused entirely on the PTO and left their allies across the Atlantic to fend for themselves. Instead hundreds of thousands of Americans died liberating Europe.
The Vietnam War was at root the US supporting an allied government in Saigon. Tens of thousands of Americans died for an entirely different country than their own, one they'd likely never been to. A tragedy, but a tragedy that's been in the history books for fifty years now.
The Gulf War was 42 separate countries banding together to liberate Kuwait from an Iraqi invasion. How many of those soldiers had ever even thought about Kuwait before being deployed and potentially dying there?
When the US was attacked by Osama Bin Laden, the US invaded Afghanistan in response. Whether or not that was a justifiable decision, at the time dozens of countries lent their support. Their soldiers died for the sake of the US, though in this case maybe some of them had at least visited it.
This isn't an endorsement of dying for someone else's country (or even one's own); just an observation that it was normal even when this poem was written, hardly modern and no need for an "update" (perhaps just an expansion of the original). I also don't want this to come across as a defense of the US or Israeli action in Iran, which I assume is what you're referring to, so I'll be explicit about my position on this: the Iranian regime may be unquestionably awful, but not only is this attack illegal domestically (in the US) and internationally, I have extraordinarily little faith that either Netanyahu's Israel or Trump's US are going to handle this war or its aftermath well, and I'm terrified about the chaos that's likely to unfold over the coming months and years.
But: this sort of thing is precisely why Israelis/Zionists/Jews often view criticisms of Israel as anti-semitic. Things that have long been considered totally normal - military alliances, in this instance - are suddenly treated as novel and uniquely awful when Israel is involved. So their question becomes, "what's unique about Israel that makes people treat us differently", and then they look at their status as the only ethnically Jewish state and the history of how the world has treated Jews and derive themselves an answer. Especially when the complaint is rooted in an age old anti-semitic trope - “Jews secretly control the world” - just with “Jews” swapped out for “Israel”.
in those times everyone was conscripted , and people had a visceral feeling of fighting for their actual land and family out of necessity. Perhaps ukrainians have that feeling.
US army is more like mercenaries on a misson. Besides, Us soldiers have not fought on US mainland for century
Ukraine is far from a monolith. It's an agglomeration of bits and pieces attached in the aftermath of WW2 to a Ukrainian core. But there are plenty of ethnic Poles, Hungarians and Russians whose lands got attached that don't identify with it.
Before you downvote (OK, you can downvote first, I don't particularly care) - go look up what folks in Hungarian parts of Ukraine do to army recruiters.
Got to be honest with you, bro. This sounds like pro-russia FUD to me.
I mean honestly, wasn't all of the USSR a big agglomeration? The bottom line now is that Ukraine is a sovereign nation recognized by the rest of the world, and they have been invaded.
Vietnam was Lyndon B Johnson making money from weapons procurement and supporting his donors. (Such as Brown and Root, who started the war as a tiny firm and ended it as one of the biggest contractors in the US.)
Iraq was Dick Cheney's sponsors making money from oil and arms deals.
Afghanistan was Bush's sponsors making money from weapons procurement.
Iran is Trump's sponsors making money from oil and arms deals, plus some crusading crank millenarianism for the faithful.
Gaza is a straightforward land grab and real estate development opportunity with some cynical other-abuse thrown in.
None of these have anything at all to do with realistic threats to non-rich people.
It's always money. Always. Someone always makes money from these things.
The disposable shlub in the Oval Office gets the reputational damage, but their funders are so happy they can barely count.
To say this is simplifying is understating just how 'not even wrong' this is...
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.
Imagine your country is a nice place with nice values might be hard to imagine for Americans. You fight so that it remains that way for future generations. Countries can cease to exist.
I get it but I don't buy this. You don't need to fight for this. You just need to live according to your values.
My ancestors' country had (and still have) nice values. Used to be under the control of France, then switched to British control, then back to French control. This happened without any war or fighting. Nothing changed for the people. They even kept speaking French. Many got rich still; just had to decide which parasite to pay tax to.
Before they learned this, they had actually fought wars against the British, but for what? The British later ended up protecting them. Protecting their own tax proceeds, really...
If the people are strong-willed and have a strong sense of community and know what is actually important, the owner country doesn't really matter. People won't obey laws they don't agree with anyway. They'll just manipulate the local authorities to report whatever they want to higher ups. What is the parent country going to do if they don't get the results they want, kill everyone in the country?
It's like having a donkey, you know you can't win with it.
It's the reason why US failed to maintain control in Iraq and Afghanistan. The people didn't need to fight to reclaim their country. In spite of massive military power asymmetry. This effect works with large populations and small populations. What more proof do we need? Fighting exists just to sell weapons IMO.
It's crazy to me that everyone assumes that you have to obey authority. People forget this only happens with consensus. You can just pretend to obey, do the bare minimum and let the authorities blame bureaucracy. Anyway these big governments have real major bureaucratic struggles internally anyway so they're used to it.
That recipe doesn’t work universally, there are wars of expulsion and extermination.
If your values are non-violent and you're value producers, that doesn't happen. Sure, there can be situations where the land itself is valuable and the people on it are only a liability, but usually the value is in the people themselves.
Sometimes, people aren't valued. Consider the Holocaust, Rwanda and the Culture Revolution.
I think you underestimate just how well national pride works on people. It's an amazing proposition - you get to identify with the struggles and achievements of millions of people over decades just by being born in some spot. This can be useful/motivating in moderation, but it's obvious how dangerously easy it is to abuse by nationalists. Russians rather feel mighty dying in a pointless war than admitting they will never be a superpower. Americans would rather reminisce about the 1950s than doing anything to fix the many ways we've stagnated. Humans are willing to accept a lot of suffering instead of feeling humiliated.
Good point. Meanwhile you can often lead a good life if you're willing to forego status and try to be objective about your accomplishments. Let others believe what fantasies they want. It's always a fantasy anyway.
Everyone is clutching onto narratives and blind-spots.
I prefer the poem Warpigs by Black Sabbath.
Wilfred Owen would never have dared to rhyme 'masses' with 'masses'.
Surprised that no one yet has mentioned the song of the same name, by The Damned, released in 1987. Very pleasing track to my ears.
I prefer Child In Time by Deep Purple.
It's a great song, but as a piece of poetry it's not even in the same league imo.
(This is my all time favourite poem though)
Same. I had to write an essay about it which helped me appreciate it in a new way.
Why did the title of the poem get translated?
Probably because of a good intention to help people understand it, but this is not the HN way. It's better when readers have to work a little: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
We've reverted the title. But also re-upped the post, because about half of this thread is surprisingly good.
The title of the poem is also only the first half of the statement. Somebody's doing some editorializing I guess
Probably with hacker news requiring that titles be in only english
Not in a case like this. On the contrary.
"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"
I don't think modern soldiers feel like they own their country.
Can you elaborate on what you mean here?
Read "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler for the first person account, "Gangsters of Capitalism" for the third person.
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...
This doggerel is every bit as propagandistic as what it opposes, and has nothing in common with Owen's poem of unbearably real experience.
> Onward, Christian soldiers, rip and tear and smite!
Doomguy feels seen. Especially since fanon has it that Doomguy is Catholic.
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.