Dulce et Decorum Est (1921)

My French language teacher at one college or other told me a story once. I might be getting some of the details wrong, so forgive me. But here goes:

In 1914 or thereabouts, his grandfather, a young French man, had just graduated from lycée or whatever and celebrated by backpacking around Europe, staying in youth hostels, riding trains, etc. He drank a lot of alcohol, made a lot of new friends, and generally had a great time.

In Germany, he wandered into a pub, encountered some friendly Germans, and joined them at a table. One drink turned into three, or five, or six, and the young Frenchman started attempting to speak the German spoken by his new friends. Perhaps he had a gift for languages, perhaps he'd picked up a little through some other means, perhaps the disinhibitory effect of alcohol helped his short-term recall for syntax and semantics.

Either way, the result was the same - the young Frenchman climbed up onto a table and made a brief, impromptu speech in German, addressed to his new friends, full of affection, extolling the virtues of modernity, goodwill and brotherhood, etc.

The rest of the pub was absolutely _alarmed_ by the young Frenchman's grasp of German. There was no way, they thought, that he could speak German so well. He must be a spy. The police were called, and he was thrown in jail.

Then the war broke out, and returning the young man to France was not anyone's concern. He spent the war locked up in Germany.

I can repeat that story, but I can't personally vouch for it. It's hearsay three or four times removed. It's a funny story, a little awful, but he's free in the end. Everything worked out.

But the awful punchline is something I do tend to believe - that his grandfather was the only survivor of all of the young men from his graduating class. Every other one died in the war.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xy0htPZZPs [2] https://genius.com/The-zombies-butchers-tale-western-front-1...

Another poem from Craiglockhart is Sassoon's "Repression of War Experience." It is one of the relatively uncommon works, both as literature and clinically, that depicts the sensory experience associated with PTSD. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57267/repression-of-w...

Incidentally, Rivers himself also wrote a paper titled "The Repression of War Experience." It was published in The Lancet around the same time. https://archive.is/EZerl

A century later, I believe the poet's attempt was more successful than the scientist's in sharing the data.

    At the starting of the week
    At summit talks you'll hear 
    them speak
    It's only Monday

    You could be sitting, 
    taking lunch
    The news will hit you like 
    a punch
    It's only Tuesday

    We'll all go running 
    underground
    And we'll be listening for 
    the sound
    It's only Wednesday

    You'll hear a whistling 
    overhead
    Are you alive or are you 
    dead?
    It's only Thursday

    Though that shelter is your 
    home
    The living space, you have 
    outgrown
    It's only Friday

    Tomorrow never comes until 
    it's too late

Lewis and Short doesn't mark that o short or long. This also occurred with vexo, which I assumed was because the first syllable of anything starting with vex- is necessarily long (because the 'x' is two non-liquid consonants).

In the case of poples, 'l' is a liquid and a short vowel could be revealed by the syllabification po-ples (or po-pli-), but I guess this is never attested? This verse can't answer the question because the syllable is allowed to be long.