When World War One broke out in 1914 Britain had only a small professional army. It needed a large one very quickly. In order to solve this problem the government would introduce conscription in 1916. However, before the introduction of conscription the government would put a tremendous amount of social pressure onto the young men of Britain to volunteer to join the army. The government began a massive recruitment drive, with posters, leaflets, recruitment offices in every town and stirring speeches by government ministers. Not only this many newspapers would include poems written as a means of shaming men...
can see just how disgusted Owen was by the propagandists in this poem. Therefore, we can see just how Owen stresses the horrors of war through his vivid and descriptive writing about soldiers in the war. The main purpose of "Dulce et Decorum Est" was to make people aware of the true nature of war. Similarly, "Disabled" also attempts to communicate the horrors of war. Both these poems were influenced by the works of propagandists such as Begbie and Pope who wrote poems unaware of what war was really like with the intention of manipulating young men into volunteering.