Ww II Poetry

War stories inherently detail some horrible decimation of humanity, with few left to tell the tale. War is a despicable ugliness that corrupts armies of men as they must fight the aggressive force of evil. Incessant and greedy, war claims many lives, but also the souls of the young men who survive its rapture. In Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est", his depiction of the vulgar death inflicted by mustard gas is just one example of the disparities of war. The picture this poem paints in the reader's mind is enough to bear, and leaves me pained that it doesn't even touch the first hand trauma our boys face.

"He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning" (Owens, 55). A devastating, torturous cruelty perpetrated by man, to destroy man, and fueled by the insanity of indignant power-mad maniacs seeking to take over the world! We kill for a person's religion, their skin color, and for the resources they may have. Savage and brutal just as the mustard gas, "eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin" (Owen, 55). Weapons of war inflict the most terrifying ways to slay an enemy, devoid of mercy or justice, catalyzing warriors to act the same. Each soldier's youthful innocence, slain and left on the bloody battlefield, doomed to be trampled by the heavy boots of hatred. Are we really supposed to think there is honor in dying this way? To die at the hands of another, adding your fate to the long list of humanities lost in the brutality of war? Faceless enemies you have no grievance with, much less understand at all, yet must die! Is there such a thing as fighting the good fight when war is avoidable? That is if we could rid the world of madmen, anyway. Nice thought of utopia; why do we deny ourselves its pleasures? It should not be impossible or laughable to imagine a world without such atrocities, and yet, even with my utmost positive outlook, I cannot picture the idea. Is war and its avid inclination toward greed, power, and intolerance, so entwined in the fabric of humanity that it is inevitable? Shall we always have need for a super hero to save the day?