Death of Wilfred Owen

On 4 November 1918, a week before the Armistice, Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen of the 2nd Battalion, Manchester Regiment, was killed at Ors on the Sambre–Oise Canal. He was 25. In his lifetime only a handful of his poems had appeared in print, but after the war he came to be regarded as one of the most important English poets of the First World War.

That morning the 32nd Division was to force the canal, whose far bank was held by the Germans. The attack went in at 5.45 a.m. after a short bombardment. Sappers and infantry launched light bridges onto the water, but machine guns fired from the far bank. North of Ors the crossing broke down, and a shell smashed one of the bridges when only some of the men had got over it. Lieutenant-Colonel James Marshall of the Lancashire Fusiliers and Second Lieutenant James Kirk of the Manchester Regiment were also killed there, both awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously. Owen fell during this attempt to cross, some 100 to 200 metres from where the bridge at Ors stands today. A few days earlier, from his billet in the forester’s house near Ors, he had written to his mother that there was “no danger down here”.

Owen was born in 1893 in Oswestry and grew up in Birkenhead and Shrewsbury. Before the war he taught English in Bordeaux. In October 1915 he enlisted, in June 1916 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment, and from January 1917 he fought at Serre and Saint-Quentin. In the spring, after a concussion and the blast of a trench mortar shell, he was diagnosed with shell shock and sent home, and then to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. There he met Siegfried Sassoon, who had been sent there after his famous protest. Sassoon encouraged him to write about what he had lived through at the front.

Almost all the poems for which Owen is remembered were written between August 1917 and September 1918, among them “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Dulce et Decorum Est”, in which he called the title’s Latin maxim about the sweetness of dying for one’s country “the old Lie”. In the draft preface to a planned collection he wrote: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” In the summer of 1918 he returned to the front, partly from a sense that he had to go on bearing witness to the war. On 1 October near Joncourt, during the fighting for the Hindenburg Line, he broke into the German positions with his men and earned the Military Cross.

The telegram announcing his death reached his parents in Shrewsbury on 11 November, as the bells were ringing for the end of the war. Owen was buried in the cemetery at Ors, beside soldiers killed the same day, among them Kirk and Marshall. Sassoon published his poems in 1920, and in the 1960s Benjamin Britten set several of them in his War Requiem.