I am the enemy you killed, my friend. This premonitory verse is signed Wilfred Owen. On November 4, 1918, in Ors in the North of France, Lieutenant Owen, 25, tried to cross this channel with his regiment. He falls under the German grapeshot. Only three of his poems will be published during his lifetime.
Wilfred Owen was 21 when the war broke out, he was teaching English in Bordeaux. In October 1915, he enlisted in the army. Seriously traumatized by an explosion on the front of the Somme, he went to convalescence where he met another poet, Siegfried Sassoon, a glorious officer, author of a pacifist declaration which caused a stir. This friendship reveals Owen’s poetic genius. It was during this period that he composed some of his most famous poems such as “Ode to a lost youth”
Source archives: – Private collection Jean – Pierre Lambre – Pathé Gaumont
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©France 3
At the end of August 1918, Owen returned to the front during the Allied Hundred Days Offensive. Here, in Ors, a century ago, a white house imagined by an English sculptor was then just a simple forest house. In this sheltered cellar, Owen writes a letter to his mother. His last. “There is no danger here,” he wrote. And if there was, it will be long gone when you read these lines.” His mother read these lines the very day she received the telegram announcing her son’s death. November 11, 1918, the Armistice came to be signed.
Wilfred Owen rests here in the communal cemetery of Ors. The horrors of war had made him lose faith and doubt Eternal Life. On her son’s tombstone, his mother had engraved these verses from the poem “The End”, The end but will remove the final question mark: “Will Life be reborn in these bodies? In truth, it will strike all death with nullity.” proved right.
