BLOG X

Is War Honorable?

            Each person need some kind of incentive to make himself satisfied in life.  It is just to look for what it makes us happy and useful in world. For example, the poem of Dulce et Decorum Est explains how individuals in war times think that war makes them honorable and useful to their fatherland. But, the poet asks in an ironic way if war is really an honorable way for dying just because you help your fatherland. The title suggest that the poem is about honor and war’s useful for each country, but when the poet starts to describe the cruelty of war, the reader realizes the title is an ironic way to outline how much the war is useless.

            The war does not show any compassion for its helpers, instead she is cruel with them and makes them feel inferior in life: “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” (625). This image draw the adversities that all soldiers have to  suffer  just to make happy their fatherland. Is this honorable? Well, it is just a cruel way to protect what they believe is correct. But this quotation just introduce the reader to the war’s scenario because the poet after that he describes how a man died drowned: “And watch the white eyes writhing in his face./ His hanging face, like a devil’s jolt, the blood/ Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,/ Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/ Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues” (625-626). This person is just one picture of a bunch of deaths in a similar way, but it is an honor issue. “innocent tongues” makes me think about war’s useless in world because innocent people died just to give empowered people glory, but they do not receive any; they only have like a payment: death which nobody is going to remember. The poet reaffirms his idea about the misunderstanding of glory when he make the speaker say to his 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” (626). Dying in war is not an honorable way, instead it is useless way to obtain glory because each on that ardent children are going to died and are going to be forgotten. They are only one more number of dead people. War is just an ironic way of dying with no glory.