Remembering the First World War
What poets and
others actually thought about the war at the time it ended.
When I compiled
my anthologies of poetry of the First World War I was interested
mainly in the poetry, but almost as important to me was the
question, "What were people actually thinking and feeling at the
time to enthusiastically support such a devastating war, and what
were their responses as optimism and patriotism turned into the most
massive tragedy so far experienced by mankind?
The extracts from Minds at War which follow are mainly the comments
of poets and others at the time the war ended. My introductory
remarks are in blue. The text and poems are just a selection from
the last chapter of Minds at War.
I include the shocking story of how Wilfred Owen's parents received
news of his death just as they were beginning to celebrate the end
of the war.
How some writers and poets completely changed their attitudes from
the start of the war is very striking - for example, HG Wells who
coined the expression "a war to end war" and Rudyard Kipling and
Thomas Hardy who had devoted their literary skills to promoting the
war in 1914.
I took the photographs in 1995. There are more photographs in Minds
at War.
David Roberts,
Editor of Minds at War and this website.
Extracts from Minds at War
AN ALIEN PEACE-TIME WORLD
-
Our power of feeling or caring beyond the
immediate questions of our own material well being is temporarily
eclipsed . . . We have been moved beyond endurance, and need rest.
Never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in
the soul of man burnt so dimly.
John
Maynard Keynes
HERE MY THOUGHTS STOP
Here my thoughts stop and will not go any farther. All that meets
me, all that floods over me are but feelings - greed of life, love
of home, yearning for the blood, intoxication of deliverance. But no
aims.
Had we returned home in 1916, out of the suffering and the strength
of our experiences we might have unleashed a storm. Now if we go
back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without
hope. We will not be able to find our way any more.
Erich
Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front
A BETTER BRITAIN?
The Herald spoiled our
breakfast every morning. We read in it of unemployment all over the
country due to the closing of munitions factories; of ex-service men
refused reinstatement in the jobs they had left when war broke out,
of market-rigging, lockouts, and abortive strikes. I began to hear
news, too, of the penury to which my mother's relatives in Germany
had been reduced, particularly the retired officials whose pensions,
by the collapse of the mark, now amounted to only a few shillings a
week. Nancy and I took all this to heart and called ourselves
socialists.
Robert Graves
in Good Bye to All That
A DEAD STATESMAN
I could not dig: I dared not
rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
Rudyard Kipling
POETS AFTER THE WAR
Robert Graves
Not only did I have no
experience of independent civilian life, having gone straight from
school into the army: I was still mentally and nervously organized
for war. Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even
though Nancy shared it with me; strangers in daytime would assume
the faces of friends who had been killed. When strong enough to
climb the hill behind Harlech and revisit my favourite country, I
could not help seeing it as a prospective battlefield.
I knew it would be years
before I could face anything but a quiet country life. My
disabilities were many: I could not use a telephone, I felt sick
every time I travelled by train, and to see more than two new people
in a single day prevented me from sleeping. I felt ashamed of myself
as a drag on Nancy, but had sworn on the very day of my
demobilisation never to be under anyone's orders for the rest of my
life. Somehow I must live by writing.
Robert Graves in Good Bye to All That
Graves's
marriage broke up. He quarrelled with all his friends, lived in
self-imposed exile in Majorca, and had a strangely subservient
fourteen year relationship with Laura Riding, married a second time
and in all fathered eight children. In his later years he formed
romantic attachments to a succession of women much younger than
himself, his "muses" who inspired some of his celebrated love
poetry. He wrote prolifically and successfully, lectured in Britain
and America, and appeared on television.
As he lapsed
into senility in the last ten years of his life, before he lost the
power of speech, he talked often of the war. He was haunted by what
he had done. He told everyone that he had murdered a lot of men.
Edmund Blunden
Gentle is what he seemed, but
underneath he was troubled, a victim of frequent bouts of depression
relieved by mad flurries of work as well as recourse to the bottle.
His experience as a sensitive young infantry officer in the Great
War haunted him all his life.
At the beginning of the Second
World War he declared, "I still regard murder as murder no matter
how boldly hidden up in steel helmets and rolls of honour."
Paul Fussell
Writing in The
Sunday Times, 2
December 1990.
Ivor Gurney
Wounds, the
effects of gassing, and shell-shock put Ivor Gurney in hospital. On
19th June 1918 he planned to commit suicide and wrote a suicide
letter explaining his motive - "because I am afraid of slipping down
and becoming a mere wreck." He didn't go through with it. The next
day he admitted that he had "lost courage".
After the war
he returned to study at the Royal College of Music. He was a
talented composer. But, he suffered from depression and was soon
committed to mental hospital where he lived for the rest of his
life, terrified of the electric shock treatment to which he was
subjected - still believing the war was going on, that he was
fighting in it, and writing poems about these experiences.
Siegfried Sassoon
After the war
Sassoon became literary editor of the Daily Herald — the only
paper which criticised the Versailles Treaty (according to Robert
Graves). He dabbled in radical politics, dined out on his fame, and
returned to his golf and his hunting. His chief task, however, was
the writing of six volumes of auto-biography which was the major
task of his life, (although he maintained that his real biography
was his poetry). But his mind was stuck in the war and he never
wrote about the period of his life after 1920.
He married
quite late in life, and had one son, George. His spiritual
searchings led him in 1957 to become a Roman Catholic.
Herbert Read
During the war I used to feel
that . . . comradeship which had developed among us would lead to
some new social movement when peace came. I used to imagine an
international party of ex-combatants, united by their common
suffering, who would turn against the politicians and the profiteers
in every country, and create a new order based on respect for the
individual human being. But no such party came into existence. The
war ended in despair in Germany, in silly jubilation in England, and
in an ineffective spirit of retribution in France. The societies of
ex-combatants that were formed in England devoted themselves either
to jingo heartiness or to the organisation of charitable benefits.
We left the war as we entered it: dazed, indifferent, incapable of
any creative action. We had acquired only one new quality:
exhaustion. . .
The political situation of
1919 offered no basis for allegiance or enthusiasm. The political
parties were all in the hands of non-combatants, especially on the
left; and deep within me was a feeling that I simply could not speak
to such people, much less co-operate with them. It was not that I
despised them: I even envied them. But between us was a dark screen
of horror and violation: the knowledge of the reality of war. Across
that screen I could not communicate. Nor could any of my friends who
had had the same experience. We could only stand on one side, like
exiles in a strange country..
From Annals of
Innocence and Experience.
Vera Brittain
Her years as a
nurse in military hospitals, and even more, the loss of her fiancé,
brother and close friend left Vera Brittain in a state of shock. For
eighteen months she felt close to mental breakdown.
Only gradually did I realise
that the War had condemned me to live to the end of my days in a
world without confidence or security, a world in which every dear
personal relationship would be fearfully cherished under the
shadow of apprehension; in which love would seem threatened
perpetually by death, and happiness appear a house without
duration, built upon the shifting sands of chance. I might,
perhaps, have it again, but never should I hold it ...
After the first dismayed
sense of isolation in an alien peacetime world, such rationality
as I still possessed reasserted itself in a desire to understand
how the whole calamity had happened, to know why it had been
possible for me and my contemporaries, through our own ignorance
and others' ingenuity, to be used, hypnotised and slaughtered. I
had begun, I thought by feeling exasperated about the War, and I
went on by ignoring it; then I had to accept it as a fact, and at
last was forced to take part in it, to endure the fear and sorrow
and fatigue that it brought me, and to witness in impotent anguish
the deaths, not only of those who had made my personal life, but
of the many brave, uncomplaining men whom I had nursed and could
not save. But even that isn't enough. It's my job, now, to find
out all about it, and try to prevent it, in so far as one person
can, from happening to other people in days to come. Perhaps the
careful study of man's past will explain to me much that seems
inexplicable in this disconcerting present. Perhaps the means of
salvation are already there, implicit in history, unadvertised,
carefully concealed by the war-mongers, only awaiting rediscovery
to be acknowledged with enthusiasm by all thinking men and women.
Vera Brittain
Testament of Youth
Wilfred Owen
In the corner
of a meadow, up a quiet lane, just north of the sleepy village of
Ors in northern France lies the village cemetery. Within the
cemetery, separated by a small hedge, is a tiny plot of land, one of
the smallest British military cemeteries in France. In the corner of
this, third grave from the left, lies Wilfred Owen.
At the time of
his death Owen was unknown to the general public, only five of his
poems having been published in his lifetime. His work, when it began
to be published, was derided by the literary lions of the day. It
took many years for his stature as a poet to be recognised.
The first
Wilfred Owen poems to be printed after his death appeared in the
Sitwells' magazine Wheels published in 1919. The first
edition of his poems appeared in 1920, edited nominally by Sassoon,
with most of the work being done by Edith Sitwell. It contained just
twenty three of his poems.
Owen, and the rest of the
broken men who rail at the old men who sent the young to die: they
suffered cruelly, but in the nerves and not in the heart. - They
haven't the experience or the imagination to know the extreme of
human agony ... I don't think these shell-shocked war poems will
move our grandchildren greatly - there's nothing fundamental or
final about them.
Sir Henry
Newbolt, in a letter to Lady Hylton, 2nd August 1924
Edmund Blunden's edition of
1931 contained fifty-nine poems.
By 1932 Owen
was still not given even a mention in the
Oxford Companion to English
Literature.
Wilfred Owen I consider
unworthy of the poet's corner of a country newspaper . . . He is
all blood, dirt and sucked sugar stick . . .
W B Yeats, in
a letter to Dorothy Wellesley, 21st December 1936 2
I have a distaste for
certain poems written in the midst of the great war; they are in
all the anthologies ... I have rejected these poems . . . passive
suffering is not a theme for poetry.
W B Yeats,
Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1936
In 1963 C Day
Lewis collected eighty of Owen's poems, and in 1983 came the
definitive collection of all of Owen's poetic writing - 177 poems
and fragments - edited and annotated by the poet and scholar, Jon
Stallworthy.
1 The Later
Life and Letters of Sir Henry Newbolt, edited by Margaret
Newbolt, p 314.
2 The Letters
ofWB Yeats, edited by Allan Wade, p 874.
Today, Owen's reputation as a
poet rests on his war poetry alone: one of the greatest poets in the
English language.
The
grave of Wilfred Owen
In the
village cemetery, in the corner of a field near Ors, north-eastern
France, not far from the
border with Belgium.
(Picture reproduced from
Minds at War)
LATE DOUBTS ABOUT THE WAR
I was intensely indignant at the militant
drive in Germany...
I shouted various
newspaper articles of an extremely belligerent type . . . My own
behaviour in 19 14-15 is an excellent example of the general
inability to realise that a "sovereign state" is
essentially and incurably a war-making state. The fount of
sanguine exhortation in me swamped my warier disposition towards
critical analysis and swept me along.
H G Wells,
assessing his early First World War writing,
THE WARNINGS OF HISTORY
The historian's rightful task is to distil
experience for future generations, not to distil it like a drug.
Having fulfilled his task to the best of his ability, and honesty,
he has fulfilled his purpose. He would be a rash optimist if he
believed that the next generation would trouble to absorb the
warning. History at least teaches the historian a lesson.
Basil Liddell Hart, from
History of the First World War 1930
AN END OF DREAMS
OLIVER SINGING
Oliver's singing
Comes down to my study,
As I sit in the twilight
Poring the problem
Of this old battered planet,
This universe tragical,
Bloodily twirling.
Nearly all his small span
And through both of his birthdays
This senseless hell-fury,
This horror has hurtled,
Yet he lies in his cot,
Happy, sleepy and singing.
Thus - I muse - at the core -
Of our battered old planet,
Something young and untainted.
Something gay and undaunted,
Like a bud in its whiteness
Like a bird in its joy.
Through the foul-smelling darkness,
Through the muck and the slaughter,
Pushes steadily forward.
Singing.
Israel Zangwill
WE ARE GETTING TO THE END
We are getting to the end of visioning
The impossible within this universe,
Such as that better whiles may follow worse,
And that our race may mend by reasoning.
We know that even as larks in cages sing
Unthoughtful of deliverance from the curse
That holds them lifelong in a latticed hearse,
We ply spasmodically our pleasuring.
And that when nations set them to lay waste
Their neighbours' heritage by foot and horse,
And hack their pleasant plains in festering seams,
They may again, - not warily, or from taste,
But tickled mad by some demonic force. -
Yes. We are getting to the end of dreams!
Thomas Hardy
(One of
Hardy's last poems.)
STRANGE MEETING
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, -
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
With a thousand pains that vision's face was
grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange friend," I said, "here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said that other, "save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of
the hour.
And it" it grieves, grieves richlier
than here.
For by my glee might many men
have laughed.
And of my weeping something had been left.
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold.
The pity of war. the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with
what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not
walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet
wells.
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds;
not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed und killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now . . ."
Wilfred Owen
The Sambre Canal near Ors where Wilfred
Owen was killed by machine gun fire on 4th November 1918.
(Colour version of picture in
Minds at War)
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