BY SOPHIA HELMKAMP

A poem inspired by Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, to the meter and rhyme scheme of Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est.


How would it change me, I have asked, to see
Amid the blood a generation lost?
Why is that war forgotten when to be
Among them was to pay so high a cost?
From death-infested filth of trenches’ mud
To bomb-rent desolated No Man’s Land
They hear a plea where dying choke on blood,
But none can find them, none can lend a hand.
The shells so scream that veterans know their signs,
But young recruits fall heedless to the blast;
The scouts are trapped in ever-changing lines,
And hear the bloody hacks from soldiers gassed.
O fearful spectacle! Why must they die?
What glorious purpose has their ill-fate served?
Why were they sent with such a dangerous lie
By cowards to a horror undeserved?
The generation lost—so many shot,
Blown up, stabbed, gassed, with ever-cheapening life,
Yet even one who drew not this fell lot
Is lost amid his home by dreadful strife.
How have the battle-trenches come to seem
So much more real than what once was all
They knew? How could men, brought to this extreme,
Return again the same, though did not fall?
Alas! First to the war in filth and grime,
With life and soul to ravaging renders tossed,
And now to history’s mist and rolling time,
A generation lost.