As the speaker follows behind the wagon—painfully aware of his friend’s suffering—the reader begins to truly see the human toll of war, and the speaker continues to decry Horace’s words. The speaker employs graphic imagery to describe a young man, the victim of a mustard gas attack, after he is throw into a wagon when the group of soldiers in marching. The dying or dead soldier is grotesque to behold, and it is not enough to wake the speaker from his nightmare of war. The speaker describes the man’s face as “His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;” (Owen 20), and he describes the horrible gargling and foam coming from the soldier’s mouth. The surreal concept of a devil, in all its wickedness, growing tired of doing evil sticks with the
