“Dulce et Decorum Est” Summary
• The speaker begins with a description of soldiers, bent under the weight of their
packs like beggars, their knees unsteady, coughing like poor and sick old women,
and struggling miserably through a muddy landscape. They turn away from the light
flares (a German tactic of briefly lighting up the area in order to spot and kill British
soldiers) and begin to march towards their distant camp. The men are so tired that
they seem to be sleeping as they walk. Many have lost their combat boots yet
continue on despite their bare and bleeding feet. The soldiers are so worn out they
are essentially disabled; they don't see anything at all. They are tired to the point of
feeling drunk, and don't even notice the sound of the dangerous poison gas-shells
dropping just behind them.
Somebody cries out an urgent warning about the poison gas, and the soldiers fumble
with their gas masks, getting them on just in time. One man, however, is left yelling
and struggling, unable to get his mask on. The speaker describes this man as
looking like someone caught in fire or lime (an ancient chemical weapon used to
effectively blind opponents). The speaker then compares the scene—through the
panes of his gas-mask and with poison gas filling the air — to being underwater, and
imagines the soldier is drowning.
The speaker jumps from the past moment of the gas attack to a present moment
sometime afterward, and describes a recurring dream that he can't escape, in which
the dying soldier races toward him in agony.
The speaker directly addresses the audience, suggesting that if readers could
experience their own such suffocating dreams (marching behind a wagon in which
the other men have placed the dying soldier, seeing the writhing of the dying
soldier's eyes in an otherwise slack and wrecked face, and hearing him cough up
blood from his ruined lungs at every bump in the path—a sight the speaker
compares to the horror of cancer and other diseases that ravage even the
innocent), they would not so eagerly tell children, hungry for a sense of heroism, the
old lie that "it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."