Owen's refrain — 'But nothing happens' — anticipates what trauma theorist Cathy Caruth describes as the impossibility of narrating trauma. Traumatic experience resists language: the event is so overwhelming that it cannot be processed into coherent narrative. Owen's poem performs this: it tries repeatedly to describe the soldiers' suffering but keeps collapsing back into 'nothing happens' — the language fails because the experience exceeds its capacity. This connects to Theodor Adorno's famous claim that 'to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' — the idea that extreme suffering makes art feel both necessary and inadequate. Owen's poem is aware of its own insufficiency: it cannot convey what the trenches were really like, and the refrain acknowledges this. Yet the attempt to represent the unrepresentable is itself an act of moral witness — Owen writes not because language is adequate, but because silence would be complicity.