Thoughts for this Veterans Day

Today is Veterans Day (Armistice Day or Remembrance Day if you live outside the U.S.). This year, it marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.

Once in awhile, I like to post something that's not about ET to remind us that, even though we have a chronic illness, we are still alive and still have the capacity to engage with the human condition, past and present. Maybe that's what we were put on this earth to do. 

So here are some thoughts on this special Veterans Day.

That's my grandfather, Corporal Clinton Foster, in the photo  at left. My grandmother, whom he would marry a few years later, dressed in her best summer whites, is standing at far left with his sisters. 

Grampa enlisted in 1917 and served Stateside during the war in the mailroom. 

His brother-in-law, my great-uncle Martin Keehn (his future wife, my Aunt Mary, is in the photo in the black hat at right), would be sent to France and serve out the war in a trench. Uncle Martin received a Purple Heart for wounds he received in battle. He would never speak of what he had seen.

Another great-uncle, Tyle Hartwell, spent the war driving an ambulance, and ended up working in a make-shift mortuary in a monastery behind the lines in Belgium. There they prepared the bodies of soldiers to send home to their families. Often, Uncle Tyle and the other men who worked in the mortuary found  keepsakes, letters, and poems that the men had written in their pockets or pouches. These they set aside neatly in envelopes and boxes, knowing that these mementos would be important to the families who received them.

The First World War was a war no one wanted, and yet it killed 37 million people, about half of them civilians. Over the decades as a college English teacher, I frequently assigned students to read work by the English poet Wilfrid Owen, who was killed in France just a week before Armistice Day at age  25. 

Before reading Owen's poems, we studied trench warfare, gas attacks, and shell-shock or PTSD as it would later come to be known. We looked at photos of the war. We examined how disabled veterans from the war dealt with physical and psychological trauma in those days before there was any such thing as a Veterans Administration in the U.S. 

And then we read Owen's poem that follows, "Dulce et Decorum Est." Over the decades, students, many of them veterans themselves, never failed to be engaged with the poem. So I offer it today and hope that you will find some meaning in it, too. A photo of Owen is just below the poem. 

Dulce et Decorum Est

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. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

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.

Wilfrid Owen: 1893-1918