The Old Lie

The poets of World War I — Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg — wrote from the trenches with an authority no civilian could match. Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" describes a gas attack in visceral detail, then calls the patriotic motto about dying for one's country the old lie — a direct assault on centuries of glorified warfare.

These poets carried moral authority because they had earned it with their bodies. Owen was killed one week before the Armistice. Rosenberg died near Arras in April 1918 during the German Spring Offensive. They placed readers inside the experience of industrial slaughter, making it impossible to hold on to romantic illusions about combat.