War and Conscience: Wilfred Owen

Illustration by ChatGPT

Note: Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was an English poet and soldier whose writings captured the brutality and pity of war, particularly World War I. He was killed in action at the age of 25.

War is often narrated in the language of glory. “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country,” classical Roman poet Horace told us. [Wilfred Owen called that “the old lie” in a poem whose title was Horace’s maxim.] Mussolini elevated war as an expression of masculinity and vitality. “War is to man what maternity is to woman,” he said. And in our own times, Donald Trump, the man who thinks of himself as the Emperor of the World, said, “We (USA) will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning.”

Nations speak of honour, sacrifice, and victory, as though bloodshed could be clothed in dignity. We can understand the grand rhetoric on honour and sacrifice. But beneath that rhetoric lies a quieter and more troubling question: what happens to the human conscience when it is asked to participate in organised violence in the name of honour and sacrifice?

Few have answered this question with the clarity and anguish of Wilfred Owen. Owen didn’t write about war as an abstraction. He lived in its trenches, breathed its poison gas, and watched young men reduced to broken bodies and haunted minds. His poetry is not a celebration of victories in wars. His poetry is a protest against war.

In the poem whose title was Horace’s maxim, Owen offered a first-hand account of the horrific suffering that soldiers faced on the front line of WWI. No soldier is happy to kill and/or die in wars. “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,” young men march with their guns levelled against people whom they have had nothing to do with. “Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, (they) cursed through sludge…” dying not in glory but in terror. The real enemy is not the man across the trench; it is the machinery of war itself, which is pure evil.

War causes a lot more than physical suffering and material destruction. It inflicts severe injury on conscience. War demands obedience. It requires men to kill not out of personal hatred but out of duty. In doing so, it creates a fracture within the self: the human instinct for empathy is forced into silence, while violence is justified as a glorious necessity.

War normalises what conscience would otherwise reject outright.

War makes life a nightmare. Owen thinks of the cosmos as either cruelly indifferent or else malignant, certainly incapable of being explained in any rational manner. A loving God is nonexistent, impossible.

In the poem ‘The Show,’ as the speaker gazes upon a desolate, war-ravaged landscape, it changes gradually to a dead soldier’s face, infested by thousands of caterpillars. The barbed wire of no-man’s-land becomes the scraggly beard on the face. The shell holes become pockmarked skin. At the end of the poem, Owen identifies himself as the severed head of a caterpillar and the many legs, still moving blindly, as the men of his command from whom he has been separated. The putrefying face, the sickening voraciousness of the caterpillars, and the utter desolation of the ruined landscape become symbolic of the lost hopes for humanity.

Owen died before the World War ended. The bitter irony is that the soldier who fought for the honour and glory of his country did not even survive to see that glory and honour.

Of course, that is not Owen’s complaint. He asks us: Will you continue to believe the noble lies of war once you have seen its truth? When you read Owen’s poetry, you can’t repeat phrases like ‘honour’ or ‘glory’ without hesitation. War is not a romantic affair as it would appear to one listening to political rhetoric about the country’s honour and glory. Owen makes us see with a clear conscience that we are morally implicated in the war. He tells us that we too are part of the war machinery if we accept its language uncritically.

Owen disturbs us with more questions. Can we retain our humanity within war? Can we resist the numbing of empathy? Can we mourn the enemy as well as the friend?

We live in a time when wars are fought not only on battlefields or battle-skies but also through screens and slogans. Hence the danger of indifference is even more poignant. We are involved! Yes, we are part of the war when we are its witnesses. When we uphold those slogans.

And our conscience fades.

To remember Wilfred Owen is to resist that fading.

Behind every uniform is a human being. Behind every act of war is a moral cost.

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026

Previous Posts in this series

Authority	Bigotry	Courage
Dissent	Empathy	Faith
Gaslighting	Hero Worship	Integrity
Joker	Kafka in His Labyrinth	Loyalty vs Conscience
Majoritarianism	Negative Capability	Outrage Culture
Populism	Quixotism	Rhetoric
Self & Society	Tolerance	Unconditional Love
Vulnerability	Next: X – You and I