Dulce et Decorum Est

The most devastating anti-war poem ever written in English. Wilfred Owen, a British officer who witnessed the unimaginable horrors of trench warfare, composed this with the fury of a man who watched friends die in mud and poison gas. The Latin title, that old lie about how sweet and proper it is to die for one's country, hangs bitter and iron over every stanza. The poem drops you into exhaustion: soldiers trudging back from the front, broken men dreaming of home. Then the gas comes. And in the final moments, a man drowns slowly in his own lungs while the narrator watches, helpless, forever haunted by what he could not save. Owen died just a week before the armistice, but this poem ensures his voice, the true voice of war, echoes across a century. It is for anyone who has been told that dying for something is noble, and suspects the people saying so have never been anywhere near the killing ground.