Owen enlisted in the army in 1915 and won the Military Cross for bravery three years later. Owen died aged 25 on 4 November 1918 leading an attack near the Sambre-Oise canal in northern France. He died just 7 days before the Armistice.

He saw action in a number of battles and met the poet Siegfried Sassoon while recovering from shell shock in a military hospital in Edinburgh.

Written between September and October 1917, when Owen was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh recovering from shell shock, the poem is a lament for young soldiers whose lives were unnecessarily lost in the European War. The poem is also a comment on Owen's rejection of his religion in 1915. This poem is, for many, the finest anti-war poem ever written in the English language. Had Owen lived beyond his 25 years few doubt he would have become one of the greatest poet in English of the 20th century.

The Latin inscription so often found on war memorials, devastatingly mocked here by Owen, reads 'How sweet and lovely it is to die for one's country'

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned out 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 gas-shells dropping softly 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 flound'ring 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

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.