Owen uses brutal, ghastly imagery to present a stark contrast between the realities of war as lived by the people who fought it and the politicians and others back home who assert that war is glorious and ennobling. To this end, Owen depicts a scene in which a young man finds himself the victim of a gas attack. Before the attack, the soldiers are "like old beggars," "coughing like hags" as they curse their way through the "sludge." Some, having lost their boots, "limp on, blood-shod." These poor men, "drunk with fatigue," have their misery interrupted by an even greater nightmare—a mustard gas attack. In the struggle to put on their masks before they are enveloped by the gas, one poor man is unable to get his secured in time. Owen uses terrifying and grotesque imagery to describe the man's horrible death. He immediately begins "guttering, choking, drowning," with his eyes bulging horribly. The men are left to watch him die, and Owen uses the horrible scene, which ends with the man coughing up blood that Owen describes as "obscene as cancer" to show that war is horrible, nothing like the glorious endeavor that many people imagine. The use of this shocking, brutal, even grotesque imagery portrays war as Owen, who served and died in the trenches during World War I, experienced it.
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