How sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country

Victory and Death.

I remember feeling shock and awe.

It was my first week at college. Everything was new and special.

The awe came from the cathedral-like setting, the grand marble staircase leading up to the reading room in Harvard's main research library. I was someplace special, almost sacred.  In a landing midway up the staircase I saw this painting. It was dark and a bit hard to figure out at first. 

The shock came from the inscription:

"Happy those who with that glowing faith in one embrace clasped victory and death."

I deciphered the dark image. A soldier in the middle, a winged image meaning victory, another figure was the dark angel of death. The solder looked happy. He stood above a fallen body--his body.

Happy? Say what? Victory? What a crock! World War One geared up the world for even more deaths in World War Two.

I was shocked at the glorification and sanitization of battlefield death that allowed--maybe demanded--more wars. A war was going on right then, 1967, and I might be pulled into the grinder. It was three weeks before my 18th birthday, and on that birthday I would need to make my way to the Cambridge Post Office to register for the draft. The scene didn't feel theoretical or allegorical to me. My government might put me where that soldier was, the real soldier, the one sprawled out on the ground, not the smiling ghost.

I stared at the image and felt my faith evaporate. This was college and I was in its cathedral of knowledge. This secular authority of wisdom, my new university home, was not just wrong, it was profoundly wrong and yet so confident in its wrong-ness that it placed this image here for young men to see. 

Oh, I thought. I felt I had lost something. 

A year later I took a class on Puritan history and learned that they had words for what I felt, their "doctrine of weaned affections." I no longer had the innocent belief and attachment to something worldly, in my case the idea that I could trust what I might suck from Harvard's breast. I needed to beware. Harvard, with all its learning, wasn't necessarily wise nor good. Not at all. Oh.

Not long afterward I stumbled upon this poem doing idle reading on the fourth floor of that library, perhaps the best-known poem to come out of World War One. 

                  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 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,
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.