We've sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,—
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn't writhe.
Here, the speaker personifies Death, simultaneously displaying distaste with a vivid description of his bad breath and humanizing him with this same quality. At the same time, bad breath is itself an evocative metaphor, revealing the visceral violence of death. It recalls the stench of decomposing bodies. Moreover, it serves as a reference to chemical warfare, which was first used during World War I, the war in which Wilfred Owen himself was a soldier. By knitting together the implied intimacy of a fellow person's breath with the horrors of chemical warfare, Owen emphasizes the peculiar ways in which death comes to seem both normal and unbearable to soldiers.
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
This moment in the poem states explicitly what has been implied throughout the first stanza—that soldiers do not dislike death. In fact, because death is so familiar, they feel a certain friendliness towards it. Death even brings the soldiers together, allowing them to bond through gallows humor. This moment in the poem tells one side of the truth, but obscures the speaker's hatred of war and his fear of death despite its constant presence. This set of lines also displays the start of a new rhyme scheme, in which CDCD rhymes replace ABBA ones. This new rhyme scheme is a reflection of the speaker's newly explicit, even didactic tone.
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death—for lives; not men—for flags.
The most immediately striking element of these lines is their rhyme scheme. The two lines rhyme with one another, creating an abrupt new pattern not yet seen in the poem and signaling that the speaker is taking a new approach. Here, he tells readers the full truth" that while death may not be his enemy, war itself is. In fact, he argues, people might claim to fight wars in order to prevent death, but they're only causing more death. The speaker separates and contrasts "men" and "flags," stating that soldiers fight against other men in order to bolster flags and nations. In creating this juxtaposition, rhyming "flags" with "brags" so that the concepts of nationalism and boastful pride are paired, the speaker suggests that the interests of a nation are not synonymous with the interests of the people it is supposed to represent.
