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2020-

2020-02-03 b
We saw the movie, 1917, this afternoon. It was an intense emotional experience and merits the highest accolades. This cinematic pièce de résistance was shot in one take. A world that still honors valor would grant this movie multiple awards regardless of the race or gender or sexual orientation of the director, the cinematographer, and the actors.

If you are lucky enough to own an M1 Garand or an Enfield, please go to where you keep it. Take it out with gloved hands and hold it reverently. Hold it so close to you that your warmth might reanimate the human souls who held it and used it. Meditate on their sacrifice. Honor them with a prayer of thanks. Then stand at attention, facing the battlefields of Europe, and salute. If you are not willing to do this, I do not want to know you.

An appropriate poem:

Dulce et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And floundering like a man in fire or lime . . .
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,
Obscene as cancer, 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. 7 October 1917

The Latin source (Horace - Odes iii 2.13):	English translation:
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: mors et fugacem persequitur virum nec parcit inbellis iuventae poplitibus timidove tergo.	How sweet and noble (fitting) it is to die for one's country: Death pursues the man who flees, spares not the hamstrings or cowardly backs Of battle-shy youths.

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