Remembering Wilfred Owen

On this day 100 years ago, Wilfred Owen, one of the most famous poets of the First World War, would be killed in action during the final offensive of the war.

His works, which include ‘Dulce et Decorum est’, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, ‘Spring Offensive’ and ‘Strange Meeting’, are some of the best-known poems of the 1914-1918 war. Sadly, most of his work was published posthumously as Owen was killed in action on 4 November 1918, a week before the Armistice of 11 November 1918.

Born 1893 in Oswestry, Shropshire, Wilfred volunteered for the Army in October 1915 and received a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment in 1916. He first saw action on the Western Front in France later that year but he was deeply affected by his experiences and suffered from severe shell-shock. Whilst undergoing treatment at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, he met one of his literary heroes, Siegfried Sassoon, who provided him with guidance, and encouragement to bring his war experiences into his poetry.

Wilfred returned to the Western Front in 1918. He took part in what would be the final offensive of the war, during which he was awarded the Military Cross in recognition of his courage and leadership. 

It is thought that his last poem, ‘Spring Offensive’, was completed during this time. After he had witnessed the desperate fighting for the Hindenburg Line, he may have added to its final stanza the words [those who] ‘plunged and fell away past this world’s verge’. 

Throughout the war Wilfred wrote to his mother, Susan Owen. His final letter to her on 31 October 1918, was written in a cramped cellar in ‘Forester’s House’, close to the tiny village of Ors. Four days later, on 4 November, he was killed in a hail of machine-gun fire near the Sambre-Oise Canal, a week before Armistice Day. He was 25 years old. 

His mother received the telegram informing her of her son’s death on 11 November 1918.

Wilfred is buried in a CWGC plot in Ors Communal Cemetery, near the canal where he died. He is buried with nearly 60 of his comrades who died in the same assault on 4 November 1918.

After the war, the Imperial War Graves Commission (as it was then known) wrote to Susan Owen asking whether she would like a personal inscription upon her son’s headstone. She chose words from his poem ‘The End’:

“SHALL LIFE RENEW
THESE BODIES?
OF A TRUTH
ALL DEATH WILL HE ANNUL” W.O.