The soldier, dying from exposure to what seems to be a chlorine gas attack, lurches toward Owen, his "white eyes writhing in his face." Owen writes that if the reader too could "pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in," watching the man dying a horrific death, they would not be so quick to believe that dying for one's nation in battle is a glorious thing.

It is likely that the soldiers put their comrade in a medical wagon to carry him away from the front lines, where he will die in a field hospital. The advent of gas masks—which Owen describes the men using—limited the effectiveness of poison gas. But it remained a terrible and horrific weapon, and when fired against unprepared men, it could be devastating. In any case, by describing how the soldiers unceremoniously "fl[i]ng him in" the wagon, Owen stresses how truly inglorious and awful the man's death is.

This horrible incident, like the rest of the poem, is juxtaposed against the heroic bromides of men back home who still believe, like the Roman poet Horace wrote, that it is "sweet and fitting" to die for one's country.