Dulce et decorum est and the long walk

Dulce et decorum est

"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"

I have decided to write about this poem because some time ago I have read "The long walk" by Stephen King, and what surprised me the most was the image of the marching soldiers that was quite similar to what Wilfred Owen suggests.


War had never been shown as what it really is, it was mostly about propaganda, as the name of the poem by Horace, who was an aristocrat, and who never really knew what being in war was like. "It is sweet and right to die for your country". This basically mean that you must feel honoured if you die for your country, which has nothing to do with Owen's poem, this poet, who fought in the First World War, ended up disappointed of the image everybody except for the ones who know what war is like. He doesn't want to be treated as a hero, he doesn't even know the point of being in the trenches.

My first thought after rading "Dulce et decorum est" was the long walk, as it gave me the same sense of violence, rudeness and reality. For those who have not read this book, it is about a hundred of young men who must maintain a certain speed in order not to be killed by the soldiers who were watching them all the time. As in Owen's poem most of these walkers thought it was useless to continue walking, even if they died because of it, in WW1 most of the soldiers thought the same. These were men "deaf even to the hoots".

“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”

It means to me the war never ends for those who were in trenches, I think finally only who were there know what frustration is, those who killed people who didn't even know for what they fought.