US and the World

Wilfred Owen and Our War Dead

Hiding Our War Dead

With the rumblings of a resurrection of a military draft -- not to be sought until W is safely into a 2nd term -- this indictment of the Bushite effort to conduct wars without human consequences is timely.

When World War I broke out, the English saw going off to battle as a fine thing to do. They embraced the Latin poet Horace's dictum, "Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori" — It is sweet and proper to die for one's country. But four years later, that romantic notion had been shattered by the grim reality of the mustard-gas-laced killing fields, and by the bitter words of Wilfred Owen, a British officer now recognized as the greatest poet of the Great War. Owen reported from the battlefields of France that, contrary to the prettified accounts being served up, the war he witnessed was full of blood "gargling" up from "froth-corrupted lungs" and "vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues."

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He is often portrayed as antiwar, which he was not. What he stood for was seeing war clearly, which makes him especially relevant today. The Bush administration has been loudly attacking the news media for misreporting the Iraq conflict by leaving out good news. Owen would counter — in vivid, gripping images — that it is the White House, with its campaign to hide casualties from view, that is dangerously distorting reality.

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Owen, who was commended posthumously for inflicting "considerable losses on the enemy," was no pacifist. He told his mother he had a dual mission: to lead his men "as well as an officer can" but also to watch their "sufferings that I may speak of them."

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The Bush administration, however, is resisting this honorable approach. In its eagerness to convince the public that things are going well in Iraq, it is leading troops into battle, while trying its best to obscure what happens to them.