Book Club: Dulce et Decorum est

We are trudging, trudging back, trudging back to camp, trudging back to a camp of rest, (sort of,) trudging back with the sound of death and destruction ringing in our ears still, though we are miles away from the front line, past the estaminet in Pop. I don’t want Anna to see me like this, weary with shock, we look like a group of pigs, all having rolled in pits of slurry, I’m glad I didn’t get to wear that Scarlet Uniform I saw being proudly paraded in Iddlesleigh, it would have been ever-brown between washes. “Y’aint a Coward are ya’?” No, but I wish I was. And anyway, restcamp wasn’t restcamp now ‘Horrible Hanley’ was back. He drilled us to our knees. Though our feet were numb and swollen. Gas! Gas! Quick Boys! My Box! My Box! I was scurrying through the seal to get it out, mouth closed, eyes shut. Yes! There it was, immediately, I was hurrying to put it on. Once I had, I looked around. Everyone but one, Richard, had got their gas mask on! In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, he descends into his lime-green foggy grave in Ypres. And crashes into the sewage ditch beside the track. My heart pounds, especially when I see his bright-yellow last breath. I wake up, distraught and writhing with pain, lungs melting, throat burning, eyes watering, I see the road, the ditch, the smoke. If you could have seen it my friend, if you could have been there, done it, been behind that wagon of death as I was. But then that haunting sight, the sight that has taken away many a precious thought of mine in my life. He kneeled, peered through the gap in the curtains at the back of the “Meat Wagon.” Our eyes met, him consigned to an unmarked grave. My friend, if you knew previously what I have just told unto you, you would not go round, championing the triumph in death of our soldiers, telling tales of might and amazement. He was but a 16 year old boy, do you think that right? So now, never repeat that old lie; Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori. Decorum, not really. Dulce, definitely not.