Whose fault is it anyways? Owen's War poems.

During this course, we have read and talked about a lot of authors, poets, writers, etc., that try to portray suffering, pain, violence, etc. But it is Owen with his war poetry the one who achieves a perfect portrait of the those feelings through the description of war.

             

Owen, in his poem "Dolce et Decorum Est", gives us a brutal image about the daily lives of the soldiers in the front line in the Great War. We can appreciate how the soldiers slowly lose their humanity and die like animals.  "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks..." that's how soldiers lived and died in the trenches, and it's terrifying. Through Owen's poems we can feel the despair, fear, solitude the soldiers felt.

But Owen's poems not only want to display the terrible things that happen in war, but he also wants to denounce that the soldiers are not responsible for the war: They are following orders. They are killing, becoming monsters, because there are some that want to play the game of thrones. 

 In this sense, New questions are raised. Why do soldiers fight wars? Is it because they are forced to? or because they are persuaded to? Owen himself answers that same questions in "Dolce et Decorum est": Young boys are persuaded by those in power. They are offered glory in exchange for their souls. A beautiful lie.

In this same way, Kurt Vonnegut writes in his famous anti war novel from 1969 novel "Slaughter house 5: The children's crusade" : 
            'Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She            had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation.             “You were just babies then!” she said.“What?” I said. “You were just babies in the war—            like the ones upstairs!”. I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war,         right at the end of childhood. “But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.” This             wasn’t a question. It was an accusation. “I—I don’t know,” I said. “Well, I know,” she      said. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by      Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war- loving, dirty old      men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be          fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”' (P.24)

Kurt and Owen, with their works, want to portray war as a senseless event, a thing that expose our children to horrors and that ends up destroying them at the end. They are telling the people not to be believe in the war hero, in the glory of war.

War for them is meaningless and purposeless. hardly ever the people fighting the wars benefit from them, and yet, people still go to war, trying to defend ideals that are not supposed to be defended violently, such as freedom, respect, tolerance, etc.

And this is why Owen's war poems are really priceless. He dares to defy the established order, to break the romantic image of war, and to portray war as cruel, horrifying and meaningless. 

But, going even further ,we could say that in the end, violence itself is meaningless and purposeless. Then, Can violence be avoided ? Is it a feature of life or something that we create? These are the questions that come to my mind after reading Owen's poems, questions that, at some point, we all should ask ourselves.

'"My Love!’ one moaned. Love-languid seemed his mood,


Till slowly lowered, his whole face kissed the mud.


                 And the Bayonets’ long teeth grinned;

                 Rabbles of Shells hooted and groaned;

                 And the Gas hissed". - The Last Laugh by Wilfred Owen

References.

Vonnegut, K. (1969). Slaughterhouse five. United States: Delacorte 

Owen, W. (1989). The poems of wilfred owen. Stallworthy, J. (Ed.). New York: W. W. Norton and                                   Company, Inc.