perpectives- innies and outties

It seems redundant to say that Wilfred Owen, in "Dulce Et Decorum Est," called Jessie Pope out for her idiotic war-mongering in her poem ""Who"s for the Game?". Obviously that is exactly what he did. However, in the spirit of Devil's Advocate, there are two ameliorating circumstances that must be put in the light in order to fully appreciate the context of these contrasting works. First, and most obvious, Jessie Pope has never factually seen war. She had never smelled powder burns coming from her own clothing, prayed for a small wound that would save her from a larger one, or had her dinner companion blown to bloody bits all over her plate in mid-bite. Women in WWI England rolled bandages, knitted socks, or, if they were especially patriotic (or poor) worked in munitions factories making bullets and bombs, but certainly they did not actually fight the wars. If that seems graphic, remember that WWI was the labratory wherein humanity invented trench warfare. The writers of the poetry in the texbook, like Owen, Rosenberg, and Sassoon, likely saw that and much worse. Reading about "A man's brains splattered on/A stretcher bearer's face" in Rosenberg's "Dead Man's Dump" leaves little doubt that these men did not see war as a game to be played at by boy children looking for fun. The one dissenting voice among the soldier-poets may be that of Brooke's, who had but the distant view of war, and that as an officer, when he wrote "The Soldier." His outlook on war, too, may have shifted had he survived even the initial skirmish to see up close the horrors of death and destruction. While every war in history has certainly had its share of supporters and detractors, it is unquestionably true that it is easier to argue the moral grounds of patriotism if you are not, and are relatively certain of never being, the one at the business end of a machine gun or land mine during that argument. The second important point to be made is that, while every war is arguable on many levels, these are not, by and large, pre-emptive arguments. The Hallmark-card patriotism drivel being excreted by Pope is actually part of a historical and continuing habit on the part of "civilized" governmants everywhere to further their political agendas by use of the talents of writers of poetry and prose. Much like Edmund Burke's difficult to rationalize ideas about why the French should simply carry on in the status quo, political propaganda is simply part of how humans do government. Undoubtedly, every party in this war had some poet who would, failing a war to bring them a fortunate circumstance for appealing to the public's need to believe in the epic heroism of war, have been a mediocre and instantly forgotten submitter to the local paper. What the male soldier-poets in the textbooks were writing was materially a different type of work. While it is an extremely effective deterrent to getting sucked into the idea of WWI as being some sort of ancient and heroic war of the gods, one suspects its other purpose was to help the writer work out the psychological tangles that the experience of war left inside of them. Tis stands in direct juxtaposition to Pope, who is writing feel-good nursery rhymes form a "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" perspective.