SIR – Is it sweet and fitting to die for your country?

As long as our elected representatives continue to use terms like ‘gave their lives’and ‘the ultimate sacrifice’, we will also continue to sanction millions upon millions of people being killed in the name of some ideology or other. These poor dead and mutilated people did not ‘sacrifice their lives’ in a noble cause, they were robbed of them by those we elected in the hope of making our lives better. I believe this to be universally true with the possible exception of the Second World War.

Politicians using such terms have clearly not read the poem of Wilfred Owen, which ends with the lines: ‘My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory the old lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori.’ (It is sweet and fitting to die for your country).

David Ryder
Worcester.