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This poem is not mine. It belongs to a man named Wilfred Owen. He wrote it in 1920, just a few years after my grandfather was born. It's still true, though. An article in the Christian Science Monitor about gas scares and gas masks made me think of. I wonder if Mr. Shrub has ever read it. I wonder if he would have pushed the button if one of his precious daughters were on her way to the Persian Gulf.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our back
And towards our distant rest began to trudge
Man marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the foots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines¹ that dropped behind.

GAS! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstacy 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.²

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

But 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,
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—³
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.⁴

— Wilfred Owen

Notes:

1. Five-Nines: the name for the shells that carried gas instead of incendiaries
   
2. Referring to the thick panes of a gas mask and the green haze produced by the gas itself. The man appeared to be drowning because the gas made it impossible for him to breathe.
   
3. Referring to the soldier's youth.
4. In Latin: "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country". See Horace, Odes. III.ii.13.

Text of the poem and footnotes 1 and 4 from The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Third Edition. W.W.Norton & Co. New York: 1983.

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