Djlce Est Decorum Flashcards
First stanza
First stanza
Owen sets the scene. The soldiers are trudging wearily back to camp where they may get a
brief rest from the horrors of the front line. The soldiers, although they are young, are ‘Bent
double, like old beggars under sacks,/Knock-kneed, coughing like hags’. This image is in
sharp contrast to what many people at the time would have associated with fighting men.
There is no glamour or glory in Owen’s description: some soldiers are barefoot, all are
exhausted and lame as they stumble towards their ‘distant rest’. Behind them, shells fall, but
the men are deaf to the sound, so focused are they on getting to the camp
Second stanza
In the second stanza they are awoken, but it is to a living nightmare. The soldiers are attacked
with poison gas and they suddenly spring into action. The capital letters and the exclamation
marks add to the sense of urgency: ‘Gas! GAS!’. The use of internal rhyme in this stanza:
‘fumbling’, ‘clumsy’ and ‘stumbling’ focuses our attention on the men’s awkward
movements. In their desperate haste to put on the gas masks, the men are clumsy. In this
‘ecstasy of fumbling’ one soldier does not get his mask on in time. Helplessly, Owen watches
as the man stumbles and chokes on the poison gas. Owen is watching through the glass
eyepiece of his own gas mask and it appears to him as if the other man is drowning ‘under a
green sea’. This simile, in which Owen compares the clouds of green gas to a green sea, is a
powerful one.
Third stanza
Third stanza
The dreamlike, unreal quality of the last stanza is continued here when Owen tells us that his
dreams are haunted by the image of the dying man he could not save.
Fourth stanza
The imagery in the fourth stanza is chilling and horrific. The dying man is ‘flung’ into a
wagon as he can no longer walk. The word ‘flung’ shows how cheap life has become and how
there is no dignity afforded to the dying. This is understandable, of course, as the soldiers can
do next to nothing to help their comrade. He is just another victim of the senseless waste of
life that marked WorldWar One. There is little time for compassion.
Fourth stanza continued
As Owen paces behind the wagon, he sees the soldier’s death. The man is writhing in agony,
and every jolt of the wagon brings blood bubbling up from his ruined lungs. Owen addresses
the reader directly in this stanza, saying that if those who read his words could see the
appalling reality of war, they would not be so quick to tell children ‘the old Lie’ that dying for
your country is a sweet and noble end. There is nothing sweet or right about a man choking
slowly to death in the back of a wagon.
