Topic: Final Week

[clausewitz]

Ah time for one more battle then. 

Another scrap with the VC lined up for tonight.  One last outing for the Irregulars before they head home to Talabheim.

[Veldemere]

And good luck to them, I have a battle against druchii tonight. There may still be time to salvage the situation.

[FVC]

I prefer Homer and Heroditus myself. I was going for Wilfred Owens paradied version, one of my faviourate war poems and essential reeding for anywone who thinks that real war is fun.

I'm not all that keen on Homer myself, but I'm with you on Herodotus. I would question the validity of taking your knowledge about war from a poem, though, whether it's Wilfred Owen's or a glorification of war. Neither is really balanced.

[Mark Perry]

I like the poem as it deals not with heroic elements of war that some people first think of when asked about war or that is portrayed in many films. Instead it deals with the dank, dark and quite futile elements of war. The poem shows the reality of war in WW1, not the heroic charge against the Hun as the recruiting posters of Lord Kitchiner would have the public believe.

Wilfred Owen was a soldier in the Great War and his poems reflect his and others personal experiences during the war. He uses his experiences to explain to the people back home the horrors of modern war. Most people back home didnt know how terrable the war was, and had an idealistic / Napolionic view of how the war was being faught. The actual line Dulce est decorm est pro patre amorie (It is glorious and wonderful to die / fight for your country) was being parodied by Owen who in his poem was saying "This is what war is like, so before you come and join me over here in the trenches understand what it means to fight a war, not the romantisised version you get from people who have never faught a war"

As for Homer, well hes like Chauser, once you get into the language his clever blend of satire, proverb and history make fine reading for me, but its a personal taste thing 

[FVC]

I know, it just doesn't strike me as fair to consider Owen's poetry a completely fair and unbiased account of the soldier's life in WWI. There were many soldier poets in WWI and by no means all of them expressed that same idea. For the very opposite of the end to Owe, Rupert Brooke's The Soldier springs to mind. As Owen and Brooke were both British soldiers who fought and died in the war, I don't think you can say that Owen's poem represents 'reality' and Brooke's does not. They both, as well as other war poets, wrote down how they perceived the war. I certainly would not like to straitjacket 'reality' to any one of those two visions.

Is war glorious? Is war horrible? I don't know, but the people who have fought in wars - in other words, the people who ought to know - have said both at different times. Seems to me that the matter is quite a subjective one. Wilfred Owen certainly gives the anti-war view very eloquently, but since when was beauty truth?

As for Homer... he's all right, I guess, but never really got to me. The likes of Chaucer had a certain wit to them, but in Homer's case, while he is telling a good story, I think the language leaves something to be desired. Maybe it's something to do with the oral tradition Homer was operating in, lacking writing - hence the quite repetitive nature of a lot of his works. I have no doubt the Iliad and the Odyssey were brilliant for the audience Homer was writing for, but for the audience of me, something doesn't click.