November 4, 1918: The Death of Wilfred Owen

November 4, 1918: Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, having already survived enough encounters with death in World War I to make most people think he was invincible, is killed in action as his unit crosses the Sambre-Oise Canal in northern France. The native of Oswestry, Shropshire in the West Midlands of England was just 25. Had he lived just 7 more days, he would have made it.

He and Siegfried Sassoon were regarded as the greatest British poets whose work was based on the events of that war. Certainly, both were better than the leading American poet killed in that war, Joyce Kilmer.

I knew Owen's name before I knew his story: He was one of the poets for whom streets were named in Greenbriar, the retirement community my grandparents moved to in Brick, Ocean County, New Jersey. Also among them was Rupert Brooke, who died on April 23, 1915, not from a battle wound, but from septicemia, from an infected mosquito bite. No antibiotics in those days. Sassoon and Kilmer were not among the Greenbriar poets, even though Kilmer was from New Jersey.

Owen had written:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, 
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.

*

November 4, 1918 was a Monday. Actors Art Carney and Cameron Mitchell were born on this day.

Baseball season was over. Football was in midweek. Professional basketball barely existed. And hockey season wouldn't start for another few weeks. So there were no games on this historic day.