Dulce Et Decorum Est

[felixta99]

A prose adaptation of Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est:

Dear Diary,
I had the dream again last night. The surreal vividness of it, the horror, the taste, the smell, send my pulse racing, as if trying to outrun some kind of dark beast, sent to drag me back there, back down to hell. I cannot think. I need to get this madness out of my head and on to the page, where it can no longer torment me.

Earlier I called it a dream, it is neither a dream nor a nightmare, it is a memory, A memory worse than any nightmare, a vision of agony and despair.

We were trudging through the mud, heading for some French village where we had been billeted for a few nights of rest. Rest that some among us were not destined to have. The going was hard, many of us were recovering from gunshot wounds, myself included. I had taken a bullet to my left arm; the stitching had come undone due to constant rubbing against my rough jacket, leaving the wound raw. I didn’t notice the pain, just like I didn’t notice the blood seeping from my feet where I’d trodden on a piece of broken shrapnel, or the puncture holes in my ankles where I’d walked into some old barbed wire. The pain just faded into the background, an undertone in a twisted symphony of pain and suffering. The pain was nothing compared to the exhaustion which engulfed us all. My rifle was the only thing keeping me from collapsing and passing out. Using it as an oversized walking stick, like a feeble old man, I hobbled through the sludge. The idyllic French countryside was long gone, obliterated by like everything else precious and beautiful by the toil of Man and Machine. One’s foot would sink until it found something solid, be it rock or a rotting corpse. "At least he had a burial" we’d say, and then we’d keep walking.

A sudden cry of "Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!" pierced the leaden air, and I was shaken out of my semi-conscious state for just long enough to realise what was going on. I fumbled for the gas mask at my waist. I clamped it over my face and fastened the straps behind my head just as the gas hit. I looked around. The murky panes tinted the scene green, as if through stained glass in a church window, protected from death in the house of God. Gas is the worst way to die, because you can’t shoot it, you can only cower and hide, you can’t stop it, or reason with it. It’s a mindless killer, there are no second chances, you’re quick or you’re dead. As I gazed around I saw him, the boy without the mask. His survival lay at his feet, half-submerged in muck. It was too late. He stumbled forward to his knees, retching up his own lungs. We stood frozen, watching the fresh-faced lad writhe and scream. He caught my eye with a horrified stare, red tears streaming down his face. I rushed over to him and caught him as he stopped struggling. He fell limply into my arms, paralyzed. His old eyes convulsed in his young head. Puss spluttered from his mouth. I put mine next to his and whispered. Whispered a lie. Whispered a betrayal by society. A comforting lie. A neccessary lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. We left him there, forgotten in the mud. A nameless soldier in a foreign land.

[THEDSW]

Okay okay. You write pretty well. (our inside joke) But seriously very good command of the language and story. It read much like a novel I could read. Instantly captured my attention. Don't make this a hobby. You may very well have "it."
DSW

[felixta99]

Haha! Thanks mate

[contessa_veeden]

I don't usually like war stories but this was riveting. Enough of the personal commentary to keep it from being too painful to read. Very nice!