WW1 - The Poets War?

Lest We Forget, indeed.

This week we commemorate armistice Day; When Germany and the Allies agreed to stop fighting after four long years of bloodshed in 1918. There has been a lot of moving and brilliant literature following the Great War, today I intend to discuss just a few examples.

You can't cover the War literature without coming across the poets. WW1 is so often called 'The Poet's War, and almost everyone will come across some of the more famous poems in their lives, most likely Wilfred Owen's Gas Attack! And it's infamous final lines;

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Whilst war poetry was not a new idea, it certainly came to the forefront in 1914 on a scale never seen before and rarely seen since. The explanation for this I do not know, perhaps it was an amalgamation of the new century, the back end of the industrial revolution and the recent demise of the Great Queen Victoria, Britain was an established empire holder, considering itself intellectually and militarily superior, Patriotism was strife and when war was announced men joined up in their thousands to 'do the right thing.  A lot of this power was lost by the war and this may well reflect in the poems. We can refer back to a translation of Owen's words;

The old lie; it is fitting and glorious to die for your country

This cynical nature is frequent throughout the poetry of the war, a developed distrust and anger at the officers and Generals and any man in charge. As a case study, the poet Arthur Graeme West kept a diary, and his change in attitude towards the war is very clearly documented despite the initial patriotism and feeling that he was doing the right thing, as shown by this passage in his diary:
"I am very unhappy... It is because my whole outlook on the thing has changed. I endured... last year patiently, believing I was doing a right and reasonable thing... I had once regarded [war] as inevitable; now I don't believe it was, and had I been in full posession of my reasoning powers when the War began, I would never have joined the army. To take a stand against the whole thing... would have really been my happier and truer course."

His disdain even spreads to the young, keen soldiers to whom he once belonged;

God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men,

Whose pious poetry blossoms on your graves

All of a sudden the patriotism is lost, the soldiers sense that the war is not going well, after the large scale military disasters like the Somme (1916) and Beumant-Hamel they start to see themselves as being played, threatened. They can't leave as they would be shot for cowardice, they are trapped and we can see this in Owen's poem Anthem for doomed youth;

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? 

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

What we can be sure about is that the large mass of moving and graphic poetry, the distress and distrust of the upper class generals that is portrayed, has seriously skewed our view on the war. Whilst the  image of the heroic British working class cowering in muddy trenches and surrounded by vermin and death is certainly not false, it doesn't cover the bigger picture. Soldiers spent less than 1/3 of their time in those trenches, most of the time they would be behind the lines and out of the firing line, they were given a hot meal every day (a luxury for a lot of them), there are poems which do nothing but ponder when the next rum ration is due. Even in the trenches, rather than constantly being sent over the front, soldier spent most time writing letters or playing cards or even writing satyrical newspapers (The Wipers Times is fine proof that a good heart was kept by at least some soldiers) And still we always associate the war with horror and despair such as is described in Sassoon's Suicide in the Trenches;

In winter trenches, cowed and glum, 
With crumps and lice and lack of rum, 
He put a bullet through his brain. 
No one spoke of him again.

Gosh, there is so much to say, I forgot that there was a part of me that actually enjoyed English Literature! But there is a lot of focus on the poetry, so now I want to briefly discuss some prose. I will focus on two books, for very different reasons.

The first book is Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Foremost because, like the poetry, it's importance and vivid description comes from the author's own experiences in the second world war. It also explore's the disorienting effects of (what we now call) PTSD through the abstract plotline of Billy Pilgrim's kidnap by the Tralfamadorians as well as the sobering effect that the war had on Vonnegut. His blase reaction to death - the only words he has to say about the countless deaths he witnesses are 'so it goes' -shows us the unnatural and indescribable effect of the war, particularly being caught in the bombing in Dresden. The book is satyrical, but it allows the reader - and, we can hope, Vonnegut - to come to terms with the awful war.

Books looking back on the war are just as important as those written by those who experiences, they can examine issues that didn't seem so bad at the time. For this reason, I choose The Absolutist by John Boyne. As well as being a love story (as all the great War novels are) it explores the treatment of White-Feather men, or Absolutists, during WW1, men who chose not to fight due to moral or religious reasons. Once they were up the front, they were shot for cowardice. It also explores the treatment of gay men in the time, linking very nicely to Bryony's monday post about Bletchley Park, Mr Alan Turing - the great researcher, shunned, discredited and forced into a painful procedure due to his homosexuality.

The literature of war is important. It tells us the thoughts and feelings as well as the cold hard facts about it, and people will be reading them for many many years to come. It is one of my favourite parts of history to study, and the literature is just as important as the textbooks.

Emily.