Sometimes a fine sentiment is turned by time into a mockery of itself. When the Roman poet Horace (65-8 BCE) wrote that “it is lovely and honorable to die for the homeland,” he could hardly, even in his wildest imaginings, have foreseen that it would come to stand, centuries later, as a sarcastic epitaph for those young men whose lives were squandered in the trenches of the Great War. The English poet Wilfred Owen used the Horatian tag (“Dulce et decorum est”) as the title of one of his bitterest war poems where he denounced it as “the old Lie.” Owen knew what he was talking about; he had served in the ranks and would be killed, in 1918, at the age of 25, a mere week before the armistice.