An Old Lie

If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy, my journey home is gone, but my glory never
dies. If I voyage back to the fatherland I love, my pride, my glory dies The concept of war
bringing glory and honor can be traced back as far as the 11th century BC in Homers The Iliad.
Battles are often seen as a proving ground, presenting opportunities for men to achieve both
honor and pride. This expectationarguably as old as the concept of war itselfis an invaluable
motivation, both in assembling men to fight and maintaining their allegiance to the cause.
However, World War I marked a change in warfare through its utilization of increasingly
destructive and depersonalized technology, and its horrors inspired poets of the era to focus on
challenging the glorification of war in favor of a more realistic outlook.
Glorifying war is directly linked with nationalism, a link that is evident in any
propaganda produced by governments at war. Propaganda utilized nationalism to produce the
attitude that if a man was afraid of war and attempted to avoid enlisting, he was a coward and
unpatriotic. By men becoming soldiers to avoid this shame and potential alienation from those at
home, the military was guaranteed continuous enlistment which was essential to the war effort.
Soldiers were encouraged to fight in defense of their nation, and it this rallying cause that is the
subject of Jessie Popes A Call to Arms; a man who enlists and is eager to fight can expect to
earn the Empires thanks (line 17) for its defense.
Because of this, going to war was believed to be valiant and honorable. In Siegfried
Sassoons Glory of Women, he writes that those not exposed to war worship decorations...
[and] believe that chivalry redeems wars disgrace (lines 3-4). However, World War I had
changed the method of fighting by turning the heroic swath of a battlefield into cramped trench
corridors. Throughout most of the war, soldiers were not charging across battlefields, but
confined within the trenches while awaiting orders to action from a superior. With the advent of

trench warfare, action ceased to become an opportunity for bravery. Instead, it was a desperate
dash through No Mans Land in an, often futile, attempt to overrun an enemy trench. Leaving the
trench immediately exposed soldiers to a myriad of dangers: incoming artillery, the scope of a
gun, mines littering the ground. Seeing how devastating and impersonal war had become,
soldiers began to realize war was not as valiant as previously perceived.
To expose the fallacy of war being an opportunity for honor, poets began to write about
experiences unique to World War I. New technology created new horrors, and British poets
began to dispel the romantic notion of war by relating their encounters. In his poem Dulce et
Decorum Est, Robert Owen writes of soldiers who, lulled into a false sense of security due to
distance from the battlefield, are caught off guard by a gas attack. One soldierafter
floundring like a man in fire or limedies guttering, choking, drowning (Owen lines 12,
16). War could no longer honorable when men were troddenin the mud (Sassoon line 14) or
dying in stench and noise (Graves line 2). Having romanticized the war in Britain, it was
shocking when World War I poets related such experiences.
Powerful, new technology increased the scale of war, producing what war poet Charles
Sorley describes as millions of the mouthless dead (line 1). Due to the magnitude of
destruction, soldiers had to be replaced as quickly as possible to continue the war effort; and, as
such, were often not given proper respect whether in injury or death. A dying man is mercilessly
flung into the back of a wagon in Owens Dulce et Decorum Est; Randall Jarrells The Death
of the Ball Turret Gunner tells of a soldier who was simply wash[ed]...out of the turret with a
hose, his death trivialized in the frenzy to replace him. Both accounts are deliberately explicit in
their depiction of the horrors of war, allowing readers to see how removed glory had become
from war.
Having been exposed to such horrors, soldiers rejected its romantic, patriotic nature and
became disenchanted and bitter. They began to question why the war was necessary when,

instead of glory, it began to produce smothering dreams (Owen line 17) and men ravaged by
war. To expose the glorification of war as unfounded and to force an end to the romantic notion
of war, a distinct bleak poignancy was utilized throughout a majority of poems concerning the
era. World War I had changed history, turning the ancient, patriotic adageDulce et decorum
est/Pro patria moriinto one that was simply an old lie (Owen line 27-28).

Works Cited
Fagles, Robert, trans. The Iliad. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Graves, Robert. "Country at War." First World War Poetry Digital Archive. University of Oxford,
1999. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.
Jarrell, Randall. The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner. Literature and Ourselves. Eds. Bill Day,
Anna Dunlap Higgins, Bill Day, Sandra Stevenson Waller. Sixth ed. New York: Pearson,
2009. 516. Print.
Owen, Wilfred. Dulce et Decorum Est. Literature and Ourselves. Eds. Gloria Henderson et al.
Sixth ed. New York: Pearson, 2009. 514. Print.
Pope, Jessie. "The Call." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. W.W. Norton and
Company, 2010. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.
Sassoon, Siegfried. "Glory of Women." Bartleby.com. Bartleby Books, 1999. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.
Sorley, Charles H. "When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead." PoemHunter.com. N.p., 3
Jan. 2003. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.