11/11

You know you are removed from a war when literature is what it brings to mind. But such is the case with World War I, which ended 92 years ago today.

I think first of All Quiet on the Western Front, a book I read so long ago but which saddens me still: "He fell in October, 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come."

And I think of the poets, their modern disillusionment stuffed to overflowing into the restrained stanzas of formal rhymed verse:

"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."

This poem is by Wilfred Owen. He died in France -- a week before the Armistice was signed.