The Speaker and His Battalion

The main character of “Dulce et Decorum Est” is the speaker, a young soldier fighting in World War I. Because of the poem’s inspiration in Wilfred Owen’s actual wartime experiences, we can presume that the speaker stands for Owen himself, in which case he is a British army soldier in his early 20s fighting with a battalion in France. The poem’s first stanza demonstrates his sense of identification with the rest of his unit, as he speaks purely in the first-person plural. Readers can glimpse this collective identity in phrases like “we cursed through sludge” (2) and “towards our distant rest began to trudge” (4).

Though the speaker will later describe his individual reaction to the gas attack endured by the battalion and reveal that it repeats itself “In all my dreams before my helpless sight” (15), by opening the poem in this collective...