The speaker of Owen’s poem is keenly aware of the agony that soldiers undergo during the war. He also acknowledges the waste of life that war represents:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge…
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…
By using appalling but accurate images of suffering, the speaker emphasizes the futility of war. He makes readers visualize what it is like to be in the midst of the fighting:
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,
At the end of the poem, the speaker directly challenges the morality of fighting for one's country in a war.
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.
His words imply that war is not worth sustaining for causes such as political or national glory. "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" is an "old lie." This text of the poem shows that the speaker strongly disagrees with the sentiment “It is sweet and right to die for one’s country.” PLATO