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/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. (Owen)
This is not how Owen "might" respond to patriotism this is a direct assault upon it. The words of Dali ring true as the toll of war is counted up among the youthful wasted lives of the soldiers who experience real death and those who experience the lasting deaths of reliving their horror throughout their now shallow lives. Dali, flippantly refers to war as trivial and ineffectual, all the while really meaning that the world is constantly altered by the constant wars fought for land, power and righteousness.
Owen hated the tools of war and the pain it caused the people who die, personifying the instruments of death, others like Kantorek might have found pride in. He gives testament to t he ironic words of Will Rogers, "You can't say that civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way." Owen demonstrates through much of his work the false sense of patriotism that Rogers jests at when he talked about the technology of war. Owen personifies the instruments of death, in the light of the parade like pride that patriots often feel for such things. In WWI when Owen was speaking the technology of war that Roger's ironically refers...
Today the words could be written about stealth bombers and armored tanks and hum-vs. Truth be told the message of patriotism is often reflected through the technology that drives war and kills the youth of society in their prime.
Owen and Rogers would both be aghast at the advances of civilization that kills traumatizes and even removes the fighter from the humanity of the enemy. Dali would be nonplus at the realization of the numbers who have been killed since his message was recorded and Hoover would be saddened by the youthful lives it has touched even in the modern world. The literature of war should be seen as a testament to the futility and repetition of war, but it is often seems to be entirely absent from the thinking of those who send the youth to die.
References
Owen, W, Anthem for Doomed Youth, at http://www.englishverse.com/poems/anthem_for_doomed_youth
On Seeing a Piece of Our Artillery Brought into Action, at http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Wilfred_Owen/1215
Dulce et Decorum est at http://www.potw.org/archive/potw3.html
Remarque, E.M. (1958). All Quiet on the Western Front. Boston: Little Brown.
