Introducing Cecil

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori: it is sweet and proper to die for one's country.

Next month I will be speaking as part of the Pacific Edition of the All About That Place series. My topic is Homebush, a gold mining hamlet in central Victoria, Australia, was divided on how its contribution to the WW1 war effort should be commemorated. One of the boys from Homebush who went to war was my husband Greg’s grandfather, Cecil Young.

Cecil was only 17 - he put his age up to enlist.

I wrote about him in my online research journal: Cecil Young and family: Cecil’s early life up to end World War I

Cecil was wounded and discharged as medically unfit.

Two of his brothers died in the war: Leslie at Fromelles, and Jack, two days before the armistice, as a consequence of being gassed.

The horrific reality of the war was expressed in Wilfred Owen’s poem.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

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 disappointed shells 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 floundering 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.

— Wilfred Owen