Dulce et Decorum est

While we were in York I went to the WWI exhibition at the York Castle Museum. This was particularly interesting for me. This is because for the school poetry competition I chose the poem Dulce et Decorum est by Wilfred Owen who is a famous war poet. This poem is about a man dying in a gas attack. It was also really interesting because I got to see what it would have been like for the soldiers at the time. There was a real World War 1 gas mask on display as well as a model of the trenches that you could go inside.  All of the captions on the pictures below are lines from Wilfred Owen Poems.

     

"Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time....
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, I saw him drowning."

Gas was first used as a weapon by the Allies in 1914. The first use of a poisonous gas was by Germany during the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915. This is a British PH gas-mask that was used during WWI. It was coated in a phenate-hexamine solution. It was the only thing that protected soldiers during chlorine gas attacks. This helmet would have been used in 1915 and over 14 million of these were produced during the war.

Having seen the helmet I can now imagine how difficult it must have been to try and fit such a bulky, heavy helmet under time pressure.  I can also picture more clearly now the meaning and imagine the horror of watching someone die from the chlorine gas in front of you knowing you were safe.  I now better understand the meaning behind Owen's line "Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, as under a green sea, I saw him drowning."  The air would have been thick with the greeny-yellow chlorine gas.  From the picture you can see that the eye-holes were covered with dirty, cloudy lenses.  Plus the soldier's breathing would have made them misty too. Therefore the lenses are the 'misty panes'.

"Cramped in funnelled hole, they watched the dawn"

These are pictures from inside and outside the replica of the trenches. It would have been really cold and full of mud back then. Even sitting in there for the short amount of time that I did I found it extremely cramped. I can't even begin to imagine living in there, and it was clean! Trenches during World War 1 were typically 50 to 250 yards apart but the shortest recorded distance between British and German trenches was only  7 meters (23 feet). Shockingly the average life expectancy in the trenches was only 6 weeks! 

"If lucky we slept under a sheet of corrugated metal
with a rat warming the back of the neck"
James C. Tait, 10th East Yorks. Pals Battalion.

In the trenches there were lots of rats which carried disease. This was a problem because one third of the people who died during WWI died of disease. The rats would also steal food from the soldiers. Sometimes they even bit the soldiers!

"Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire,"

Here you can see the wall of the trenches. It was built with sandbags and topped with barbed wire.      In this picture you can also see a machine gun mounted on top. There were 25,000 miles of 

    zigzagging trenches along the western front alone. It must have been really scary in the trenches. 

    There were 80,000 recorded cases of shellshock but probably thousands more weren't recorded.          

The allies would make paper mache heads on poles and have them sticking out of the trenches to trick the Germans. They would also sometimes just prop helmets on the poles. This also worked because there was so much smoke in the air from the guns and explosives that were being used. During the war at least 6,000 men died a day and 9 million died in total in the fighting, so I can understand why they didn't want to go sticking their real heads out of the trenches.

At the end we got to write a message on the blackboard

It was good to have this experience because it helped me understand how awful life was for the soldiers who fought in this war and any other war and I thank them for their sacrifice. It also makes me grateful that we live in a time of relative peace. It helped to give me a deeper understanding of the poem I performed for the school competition. I also think there is still a lot we can learn from our past that can help us maintain a peaceful future so that no one else has to go through the same horror as these soldiers. 

Lest We Forget

Here is the poem Dulce et Decorum est:

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 gas-shells dropping softly 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.