LECTURE 9

THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN POETRY

1. NO MAN’S LAND

When we think of the First World War, the imagery comes from the Western Front: the deafening, enervating artillery barrages; the assaults in which long lines of men moved forward as if in slow motion over a lunar landscape of craters and mud, only to confront barbed wire and machine guns; the horror of gas attacks. There was a paradox about this kind of warfare: the most modern technology produced a battlefield in which men lived under the most primitive conditions–like troglodytes in holes in the ground. It was the last large-scale war in which men brought to the battlefield idealistic illusions about the nature of combat: that it ennobled; that it gave healthy exercise to the youth of lethargic, peaceable nations; that it was the highest form of virility.

Hemingway memorably described how language itself had failed: "I am always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain…. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene, beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates…. Now for a long time I had seen nothing sacred and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing were done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words which you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of the places had dignity."

In previous wars battles had lasted for a few days at most. They had a beginning and an end, after which the dead of both sides were buried, usually as intact bodies. But the First World War was different in this respect. Combat went on for months; artillery fire dismembered men in a flash; and the front line hardly moved at all. The dominance of long-range artillery, the machine gun, and barbed wire immobilized combat and mechanized slaughter. The line of trenches stretching from Switzerland to the English Channel was littered with the remains of perhaps a million men, many of whom would remain "unknown soldiers." Those who continued to fight were surrounded by the dead who were moldering into the ground, and by the rats who fed on their lifeless bodies. The letters and memoirs of soldiers are full of surprising encounters with corpses and rats, complaints of being unable to escape the mud and the vermin. In a mobile war the armies move on from their dead and can forget them; but in this stationary war the living remained surrounded by the dead so that every day they were reminded of the enormity of their losses and the insignificance of their gains. This kind of familiarity with death had not been seen in Europe since the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century.

Meanwhile, the enemy, having retired underground, was mainly invisible. The landscape of battle was empty of living men, but saturated with dead ones. "No Man’s Land" was the killing zone between the lines of fortified trenches. "Modern combat," wrote an Austrian officer, "is played out almost entirely invisibly; the new way of fighting demands of the soldier that he withdraw from the sight of his opponent. He cannot fight upright on the earth but must crawl into and under it; at sea he fights most securely when he is concealed under the surface of the water, and in the air when he flies so high that he no longer offers a target." A German writer, Ernst Toller, commented on the illusion of salvation by technology: "Instead of escaping the soul-killing mechanism of modern technological society, we learned that the tyranny of technology ruled even more omnipotently in war than in peacetime. The men who through daring chivalry had hoped to rescue their spiritual selves from the domination of material and technical forces discovered that in modern war the triumph of the machine over the individual is carried to its most extreme."

2. SHELL SHOCK

The war took on a characteristic rhythm: long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of intense panic, as shells screamed overhead or clouds of gas drifted across the lines or officers gave the order to go over the top. Night and day were reversed, as working parties repaired the barbed wire or scouted the terrain during the hours of darkness and tried to sleep during the day. "Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous," wrote the painter Paul Nash. "They are mockeries to men, only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds all through the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere in such a land. The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered with inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease." As the rain and shelling continued day after day, the labyrinthine networks of trenches and wire induced feelings of claustrophobia; the deafening noise of artillery produced "shell shock," the soldier’s version of hysteria.

"The cause of shell shock, it was generally agreed, was the emotional disturbance produced by chronic conditions of fear, tension, horror, disgust, and grief; and war neurosis was an escape from an intolerable situation, a compromise negotiated by the psyche between the instinct of self-preservation and the inhibition against deception or flight, which were rendered impossible by ideals of duty, patriotism, and honor. Placed in intolerable and unprecedented circumstances of fear and stress, deprived of their sense of control, and expected to react with outmoded and unnatural ‘courage,’ thousands of men reacted instead with symptoms of hysteria; soldiers lost their voices and spoke with their bodies. If it was the essence of manliness not to complain, then shell shock was the body language of masculine complaint, a disguised male protest, not only against the war, but against the concept of manliness itself" (Elaine Showalter).

3. STALEMATE

Every belligerent country in 1914 took up arms either to repel a direct invasion of its territory or to fulfill precise obligations to allies that could not be abandoned without shattering consequences to national morale, prestige, and interests. The Great Powers went to war, in short, lest they cease to be great powers. But there was no verdict and the war could not be stopped. Why should the Germans, who had occupied a considerable part of Northern France at terrible cost, abandon an inch of that territory to an enemy who might use it as a springboard for another war? How could the French contemplate peace with the invader still lodged on the sacred soil of France? How could the British acquiesce in a settlement that would leave tiny Belgium, just across the English Channel, under the boot of the Germans? How could the Russians, having failed repeatedly in recent years, afford to fail again?

The war bogged down into a dreadful stalemate because the defense was mechanized and the offense was not. The machine gun, which could spray a curtain of bullets over the battlefield, could mow down swathes of men who, until the tank was invented, were attacking without the benefit of armor. The defense could always bring reinforcements to the front by railway; the attackers, lacking sufficient numbers of tanks and trucks, had to haul themselves through any gap in the enemy’s lines by foot and horse. A century earlier a soldier’s musket had a range of 100 yards; in 1914 the effective range of a rifle was 2000 yards. This 20-fold increase in range meant that attacking troops stayed under defensive fire for a much longer period of time, incurring much heavier casualties. And the means of communication had fallen behind the means of destruction. The generals were ten miles behind the front trying to conduct the war by telephone, but the telephone lines of attacking troops were soon cut by shellfire. Soldiers on the attack therefore advanced blindly into battle, unable to respond quickly to changes in battlefield conditions or to receive fresh orders.

They felt abandoned by the generals, whom they despised for their stupidity. The generals had been trained to trust in the superiority of the offensive. The war could not be won, they believed, by subtlety of maneuver. "The decision would go to the commander who displayed the strongest moral fiber, who, undismayed by his own casualties, forced the enemy to exhaust his reserves until the moment came when nerve and resistance snapped, the battlefield broke and the victor could surge forward" (Michael Howard). But this rarely happened, and on the Western Front, it did not happen until 1918. The answer to the dominance of the machine gun, apparently, was more shells and bigger guns. Political leader strained their nations’ resources and economies to provide them, but every artillery barrage forfeited the element of surprise. And coordinated attacks by timetable forfeited the element of flexibility.

And while the leadership had failed, the "home front" did not understand what was happening. The newspapers presented defeats as victories, stalemate as tactical maneuvering. Atrocity stories were invented, and real atrocities were covered up. The soldiers despised bureaucrats, politicians, "brass hats," journalists, and war profiteers. And these soldiers were, for the most part, literate. Millions of them were from the middle classes. Many of the English officers, from "public" schools, carried the newly published Oxford Book of English Verse in their packs. The contrast between the classic literature they loved and the grotesque realities of the battlefield produced the bitter ironies so characteristic of the poetry of the First World War.

4.RUPERT BROOKE AND THE GENERATION OF 1914

But it took some years for that literature to emerge in Britain. English literature had a pastoral bias, a preference for the country over the city, even if Britain had been the first industrial and urban society. The Edwardian and Georgian poets often idealized hill and dale, seedtime and harvest, woods and flowers: this was after all a generation that could admire the countryside without having to make a living from it. But the front was filled with ugliness and devastation: not a tree survived for three miles on either side of the lines. Death was impersonal and wounds were horrible. Educated Englishmen at first found it impossible to describe what they were seeing and feeling.

The most popular poet of the war was Rupert Brooke, who died in 1915, before the worst horrors of trench warfare had become apparent. "Under his influence," Virginia Woolf wrote, "the country near Cambridge was full of young men and women walking barefoot, sharing his passion for bathing and a fish diet, disdaining book learning, and proclaiming that there was something deep and wonderful in the man who brought the milk and the woman who watched the cows." He came from an academic family, and belonged to a circle that was progressive in its politics: liberal or even socialist, feminist, indifferent to religion, irreverent about conventions and traditions, in favor of natural as opposed to formal manners. But Brooke and his friends were far from the spirit of the French avant-garde. Brooke still wrote poems that rhymed and obeyed the conventions of meter and form that had existed since Petrarch composed his sonnets in the fourteenth century.

But Brooke, whom everyone adored or envied as a "golden-haired Apollo," was unsure of his career and unhappy in his love affairs. (One of his girlfriends, the actress Cathleen Nesbitt, appeared in the famous television series Upstairs, Downstairs in the 1970s, sixty years after her lover’s death.) The war came as a relief from a period of floundering and confusion. Churchill himself had gotten Brooke his combat posting in 1914. In Belgium Brooke saw Antwerp in flames, refugees in flight, the flash of shellfire as he stood guard while his troops slept in the courtyard of an abandoned chateau. The discovery of his own coolness under fire gave him a sense of resolution. Much of the imagery of his great series of sonnets in 1914 comes from his confidence that he had left behind the hesitations and entanglements of his prewar life. Hence the strong emphasis on escape, liberation, purification. Ironically, Brooke died in 1915 of an infection on the way to Gallipoli. The emotions he captured in his sonnets could not survive the experience of prolonged combat–the deafening noise of persistent artillery fire, the fatigue brought on by nights without continuous sleep, the filth and boredom of the trench routine.

5. SIEGFRIED SASSOON: MEMOIRS OF AN INFANTRY OFFICER

The poet who broke the mold in English literature was Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967). We’ve seen that the tendency of modern art is to violate traditional notions of decorum and beauty. Sassoon was one of the first poets to incorporate ugliness into English poetry and to associate it with truth. His soldiers blunder, flounder, slide, trip, stumble, and lurch through sludge-filled trenches. They are disconsolate and haggard, with their "muttering faces masked with fear." On leave, they are "driven stark, staring mad by memories of the guns and "dreams that drip with murder."

The Sassoons were wealthy financiers of Persian-Jewish origin who had associated with the fun-loving Prince of Wales. Siegfried’s earliest passions were for music, poetry, riding, cricket, tennis and fox hunting. He was 28 in 1914 with no career in sight; for him to the war came as welcome relief from the confusion of civilian life. In 1915 he composed verses inspired by Brooke’s sonnets, describing British soldiers as a "happy legion" who were fortunate to fight.

He won a Military Cross for risking his life to bring back the wounded after an unsuccessful raid. He also won a reputation as an officer of awesome courage ("Mad Jack") who enjoyed patrolling No Man’s Land alone. He was more fortunate than most officers who participated in the first day of the attack on the Somme: three of four of them were killed. Thirty thousand British soldiers were killed or wounded in the first thirty minutes of the battle, and sixty thousand men had fallen by the end of the day–the worst in the British army’s entire history. Over the next five months the fighting consumed nearly a million men at the rate of 300 per hour, 5 per minute. Sassoon was stricken with gastric fever and sent home. This probably saved his life, but he was soon enraged by the contrast between conditions at the front and the sanitized reporting of those conditions at home. A letter of protest, composed under the tutelage of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, nearly got him court-martialed and imprisoned, but his friends contrived to have him declared shell-shocked and neurasthenic instead. Sent to a hospital at Craiglockhart, he began insisting that most of his fellow patients were shirkers and wanted to get back to the front with his men.

But in the meantime he began to write a new kind of poetry. The poems fire away at the generals and bishops and parents and sweethearts for not understanding: the war is a dirty trick played by the older generation, sternly patriotic and incompetent, on the young who did the fighting. At his best Sassoon captured the soul-wrenching terror of troops stumbling over the top with their heavy packs and advancing into No Man’s Land, as well as the "galloping fear" with which they awaited the inevitable counterattack. He caught the chilling impersonality of death on the battlefield, and the angry feelings of isolation from government, army, and family that British soldiers developed after the Battle of the Somme. His real achievement was a double-barreled attack on the chivalrous and pastoral traditions of English poetry in favor of a language that combined satiric bite and harsh realism. Was this modernist poetry, like that of Apollinaire? No, but it was a modern idiom, suited to the grotesque and terrifying conditions of trench warfare.

6. ISAAC ROSENBERG: DEAD MAN’S DUMP

Isaac Rosenberg was born in 1890 into a family of impoverished immigrant Russian Jews who settled in London’s East End. He began to write verse and to paint in adolescence, but had to go to work at 14: in this respect his experience was completely different from that of Brooke and Sassoon. He was sent to the Somme as a private, whereas the other major First World War poets were gentlemen-officers. He wrote English almost as if it were a new language for him: "Never having mastered the art of writing a good poem, he was preparing himself to write a few great ones" (Irving Howe). He was drawn to Biblical myth, and wrote a verse play, Moses, about the summoning of one’s energies for self-assertion.

He hated the army and the idea of killing. In the best of his trench poems he focuses on a commonplace event, a lull in the fighting, the weariness after a moment of danger. He doesn’t complain or rebel or offer opinions, but rather fuses a poeticism like that of Thomas Hardy with the music of his own harsh urban speech. The conclusion of his poem "Returning, We Hear the Larks" is about the sheer arbitrariness of survival, and "Dead Man’s Dump," one of the greatest and most ambitious of First World War poems, is about the oblivion of death.

7.WILFRED OWEN AND THE PITY OF WAR

Owen was born in 1893, the son of a minor railway official and a fiercely religious mother who looked to her son to restore the family’s lost gentility. As an assistant to a local vicar he lost his evangelical faith but learned compassion for the poor. He described the landscape of trench warfare in a letter: "I suppose I can endure cold, and fatigue, and the face-to-face death, as well as another; but extra for me there is the universal pervasion of ugliness. Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language and nothing but foul, even from one’s own mouth… everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious. But to sit with them all day, all night… and a week later to come back and find them still sitting there, in motionless groups, THAT is what saps the ‘soldierly spirit.’"

Shell-shocked and accused of cowardice by his commanding officer in 1917, Owen was sent to Craiglockhart and fell under the influence of Sassoon. Both poets were homosexual, and Sassoon eventually introduced Owen to London’s homosexual community, including Robbie Ross, who had been Oscar Wilde’s first lover many years before, and Scott Moncrieff, the brilliant translator of Proust. At Craiglockhart the regimen included "ergotherapy" (work-cure) and "synoptic seeing" (nature expeditions that sharpened his powers of description).

Owen’s poetry is steeped in the imagery of the Bible, and it tends to view the combatants as a generation of innocent youth sacrificed to "choirs of shells." In "Parable of the Old Man and the Young" he rewrites Genesis 22:

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,

And took the fire with him, and a knife,

And as they sojourned both of them together,

Isaac the first-born spake and said, my Father,

Behold the preparations, fire and iron,

But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,

And built parapets and trenches there,

And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.

When lo! An angel called him out of heaven,

Saying, lay not thy hand upon the lad,

Neither do anything to him. Behold,

A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;

Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not do so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Owen’s poems "are protest poems, directed against many of the same targets as Sassoon’s–notably the old men of the Army, Church, and Government who send young men to their death–but, as imaginative and musical structures, they are more complex and reverberant than Sassoon’s" (Jon Stallworthy). After Craiglockhart "the soldiers who make up his subject are no longer just ‘the fallen’ but admired physical types. Their wounds are specific outrages; their sufferings all the more terrible because they now offend a sensibility which is not only sympathetic but eroticized. We find him communicating a delighted sense of his male companions which stimulates and dignifies his sense of their imminent or actual loss" (Andrew Motion). Owen went back to France in 1918, received the Military Cross, and was killed just in time for his parents to receive the news of his death by telegram as the bells were ringing for the armistice.

RECOMMENDED:

Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge, 1979).

Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Harvard, 1979).

J.M. Winter, The Experience of World War I (Oxford, 1989).

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975).

Michael Howard, "Reflections on the First World War," in Studies in War and Peace

(New York: Viking, 1970).

Elaine Showalter, "Rivers and Sassoon: the Inscription of Male Gender Anxieties," in

Behind the Lines, ed. Margaret Higonnet (Yale, 1987).

John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Vintage, 1979).

Andrew Motion, "Coming Out to Greatness," TLS, 6 November 1992.