It is late Wednesday morning. Saddam Hussein’s 48 hours have dwindled to single digits. I load the player with the two compact discs that contain the music of Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem.” When one doesn’t know what to say, sometimes it’s best to just listen to a genius.

Britten was, to my ears, one of the great musical geniuses of the 20th century, and this piece his greatest achievement. It is a huge work: full orchestra, plus a chamber orchestra; full chorus, plus a boy’s choir, plus three vocal soloists. It was written for the consecration in 1962 of the new Coventry Cathedral on the grounds of the 1,000-year-old cathedral that was destroyed in the Battle of Britain 22 years earlier. Its form is that of the traditional Latin Mass for the Dead (Requiem Aeternam, Dies Irae, Offertorium, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, Libera me) interspersed with nine songs derived from the poetry of Wilfred Owen.

Wilfred Owen was one of the many great poets who found his art in the trenches of World War I. Like so many others, he did not live to practice his art in peacetime – he was killed in battle on Nov. 4, 1918, just seven days before the Armistice.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis. The chorus asks God to grant the dead eternal rest and perpetual light. The tenor answers:

What passing bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

A tragic work, the War Requiem was not meant to glorify the Allied victory in World War II; it is a denunciation of the evil of war, but not of other men. Britten wrote the piece for three specific soloists – a German baritone, a Russian soprano, and a British tenor – a sign he saw beyond the losses of his own country, a symbol of reconciliation.

It is an anti-war work, words and music. Though Owen wrote for the brave soldiers on both sides of No Man’s Land, you have to wonder what he thought of the political cowards who put them there. How different his poetry might have been if the nations of the world had united to tell Austria that the assassination of an archduke was a crime, not an opportunity to solve its Serbian problem. If they had told Russia that Austria going to war against Serbia was not an invitation to expand its influence in the Balkans. If Germany’s allies had told Germany that is long-held plan to attack France by marching through neutral Belgium in the event an ally of France (Russia) went to war against an ally of Germany (Austria) was stupid, wicked and deserving of no allies.

How much different would Britten’s greatest work have been had Coventry Cathedral not been destroyed in 1940 because there had been no Battle of Britain because World War II never started because the 1930s had not been a decade of appeasement. If the nations of the world had stood up to the aggression that swept across Asia, Africa and, finally, Europe, the thousand-year-old church would today still be a place of worship and not a pile of rubble for tourists to gape at.

Salva me, fons pietatis, sings the chorus. Save me, fount of pity. The tenor and baritone answer:

Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death:

Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland, –

Pardoned his spilling mess-tin in our hand.

We’ve sniffed the green thick odor of his breath.

And how much different might today, a day of unbearable apprehension, be if the anti-war movement had taken its serious work more seriously, if the criticism it directed at one president who – though perhaps wrong-headedly – is trying to deal with another president who most assuredly is a murderous tyrant had not been so infected with ridicule as to give the tyrant encouragement. If the nations of the world, when giving that tyrant one last chance in November, had reckoned on one day having to back up that ultimatum. If the nations – France, Germany, Russia in particular – that now tout containment as the solution had not spent the last 12 years eviscerating containment through oil deals, loans, technology sales, winks and nudges.

We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!

We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.

No soldier’s paid to kick against his powers.

We laughed, knowing that better men would come,

And greater wars; when each proud fighter brags

He wars on Death – for Life; not men – for flags.

It is now late Wednesday evening. This greater war – greater if only because it is our war – has begun, just minutes after Saddam Hussein’s 48 hours ran out. Maybe it will be over quickly, maybe never. Maybe the Iraqi army will throw down its weapons at the first shot, maybe they will fill the air with the “green thick odor” of Saddam’s breath.

When and how this war ends almost seems irrelevant. Unless the nations of the world change the way they deal with murderous tyrants – unless opportunism, appeasement, dealing, winking and nudging are replaced by resolute unity – the old scythe swinger will have plenty of even greater wars to enjoy and lots of new chums to laugh with.

A tragic irony of Wilfred Owen’s tragically short life – in addition to the irony that he wrote his poetry during the war to end all wars – is that, to my eyes, his greatest single line is found not in a poem but in a letter home. It’s an astonishing line, eight short words that contain a universe of hopelessness and despair, as true in 2003 as it was in 1918: All a poet can do today is warn.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.