Sed miles, sed pro patria: Classical Imitation and Allusion in the Epigraphic History of the First World War | Izzy Nendick

By Izzy Nendick

If you only had sixty-six characters to commemorate your loved one, killed before their time at the hands of a war deemed ‘great’, what would you choose to write? The sentence you are reading right now is a mere sixty-five characters long. It does not allow for much sentimentality. Yet those who were told by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to eulogise their departed with such brevity often looked to the Classics, reminiscent of both a glorious imagined heroic past and British upper-class schooling.

The classical quote served as a confluence and communicator of education and militarism, displaying learning as well as a false sense of death for glory, set against the backdrop of the First World War. The repeated utterances of the past in grave markers and poetry were a conscious act done to encapsulate and continue an imagined inheritance from the romanticised past into the context of World War One; ancient concepts pulled rather than pushed into the modern era. Whilst grave markers and their classical allusions communicate how people felt about the war and the resulting deaths, poetry both served as a motivator and as justification, as well as a reflective tool for the experience of war and conflict.

As the horrors of the First World War became apparent to those serving abroad in France and Belgium, the antique maxims learnt back at school became epitaphic, adorning the graves of the dead, recalling both the ancient past that they saw themselves continuing and the more recent past of their innocent childhood and education.

Limited to the sixty-six characters permitted by the War Graves Commission, classical quotations proved to be popular eulogies. Some examples include persta atque obdura (Be steadfast and endure; Horace. Sat. 2.5.39), coelum quid querimus ultra (What we seek more than heaven; Lucretius 3.18), and omne solum forti patria (To the brave, every land is his homeland; Ovid. Fast. 1.493). Many of the classical quotations used on epitaphs evoke a sense of patriotism for one’s country, adapting the classical tag to fit one’s desired message of love for England and dying for its ‘freedom’. However, not every epitaph written in Latin is of ancient origin. One epitaph reads “cui flos iuventutis integrae resectus est” (For what purpose has the flower of this generation been cut back?), and while it is not a quotation of any Latin author, it intends to appear as one. The use of Latin both imitates the use of ancient poetry for remembrance and makes use of a language emphasised in the public school system, giving subversive weight to its anti-war sentiment and indicating that classical imitation was just as powerful as allusion.

Another popular invocation of the past used by the soldiers of the First World War was Simonides’ epitaph for the Spartans at Thermopylae: “Stranger, report to the Spartans that we lie here, obedient to their words.” In Maitland’s epitaph for The Belgian Dead, he precedes the dedication with an untranslated passage of Simonides, memorialising the Lacedaemonian dead at Plataea. To use the epitaph without translation, and then to link it to the commemoration of the modern dead, relies on a presumption of the reader’s own education to inform them of the connection, therefore utilising the classical object to form modern sentiment. Like the original Greek context, Simonides’ words were also used physically to mark graves and memorials. Used previously in the Boer War, the quote proved popular again during the First World War, when it was used on epitaphs commemorating those lost at the Battle of Gheluvelt, the 9th Devonshires at the Somme, and The War Memorial in Southport, as well as many more private graves.

While epitaphs used classical quotations to adhere the dead to the perpetuity of dying for one’s country, attributing the deaths to the unending cycle of human violence, poetry was a way for the living to explore the same themes. Poetry began to question the use of the classical object in reference to warfare, and while some upheld the sacrificial axioms of antiquity, others rejected their use as bromidic, changing how we view classical quotations to this day.

Indeed, the popularity of the Latin aphorism applying to the memory of public school can be addressed with the final lines of Newbolt’s poem Clifton Chapel: “Qui ante diem periit:/ Sed miles, sed pro patria” (Who died before his time but as a soldier and for his country). The poem places this archaic Latin maxim in the school chapel, thus directly linking an

appropriation of the classical past with the physical and ideological architecture of the public school and its ethos of steadfast loyalty and self-abnegation. The poem proved to be inspirational to many in joining the war effort, seeing Newbolt’s Latin creation as a continuation of the somewhat anachronistic classical ethos of patriotism learnt in public school.

Initially the use of this Latin tag was a way to justify war and sacrificing oneself for their country, just as men had since the days of the Roman Empire, and to tap into the public-school ethos of unfaltering loyalty. However, the poetry of World War One began to subvert the tenet, resulting in Wilfred Owen’s proclamation of Horace’s words as “that old lie.” The phrase dulce et decorum est pro patria mori comes from the Odes of Horace, written with sincerity in the first century BCE, and nearly two thousand years later would come to adorn the walls of Sandhurst and numerous grave epitaphs, still spoken with the same sincerity as its Roman author.

Geraldine Robertson Glasgow’s poem titled Dulce et Decorum harnesses the Classical quotation to explore how the glory of dying for one’s country surpasses the horror of the death itself. In a similarly sincere yet more distasteful sentiment, J.W. Poe’s use of the same line of Horace for the subtitle for his poem on the Indian troops: “You have bound us to your Empire/ in bonds of Brotherhood fast,/ Eager to further its future,/ Proud to have share in its past.” The poem utilises Latin to reinforce both the message of colonialism and unquestioning self-sacrifice, which is made worse by the fact that Poe thinks the Indian troops would think it was ‘sweet’ to die for a country they had never visited, and which had exploited them for over a century. The use of Latin also reinforces the imperial sentiment, linking the British Empire to the Roman, and normalising nationalistic self-sacrifice. Owen’s poem Dulce et Decorum Est subverted the prior use of the maxim to the extent that it can no longer be used sincerely. It sparked a recognition that the classical object, in the form of an over-quoted line of Horace, was truly being pulled into the narrative of the Great War, rather than being words to live (or die) by. The horrors of modern warfare in the First World War are fleshed out by Owen, with the horror of chemical weapons concluded by the Latin phrase about glory and sacrifice. Although he was not publicschool educated, Owen admired Latin and saw it as an access to social mobility. His rejection of mindless self-sacrifice enforced by education and the heroics of antiquity was complete with the declaration of Horace’s words as a time-honored, intentional lie.

Bolstered by the public-school ethos and emphasis on Classics, classical quotation justified the modern warfare and slaughter of World War One by forcing links to the heroic past of Thermopylae and the Roman Empire. Quoting the classics had long been a popular medium of expression, and the classical education in Britain’s public schools in the nineteenth and early twentieth century placed emphasis on these tags and apothegms as capturing the proper sentiment and spirit of what a good man should know and be. This characterisation, formed in the ancient past and public school, was then used to spur men into joining the British Army at the outbreak of war in 1914. Enacted both societally and on a personal level, individuals chose “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” for their gravestones as much as society pushed that message onto those conscripting. Only after witnessing the horrors of modern warfare did those like Wilfred Owen start to question the much-used Horace quotation and others and began to identify them more as moral propaganda reanimated from a distant and irrelevant past.