History of Philosophy Audio Archive #16 - World War One (WWI): Roy Casagranda
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Austin School professor Roy Casagranda lectures on the origins and combat of World War 1. Professor Casagranda brings an idiosyncratic and unvarnished perspective on the Great War, which ended not with a peace, as everyone had hoped, but what French general Ferdinand Foch prophetically called in 1919 a 'Twenty Year Armistice'.
It would turn out that Foch was wrong, but only by only a few months...
The original YouTube video can be found here.
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Dulce et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till in 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 tired, outstripped Five-Nines 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 flound’ring 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.
Composed October 1917,
published posthumously 1920.
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