Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (31 page)

Before the war Brooke was one of the Georgian Poets who celebrated rural
England; their favoured techniques were unpretentious and blunt, if somewhat complacent.
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In 1914 there had been no major war for a hundred years, since Waterloo in 1815; reacting to the unknown was therefore not easy. Many of Brooke’s poems were written in the early weeks of the war when many people, on both sides, assumed that hostilities would be over very quickly. He saw brief action outside Antwerp in the autumn of 1914 but was never really in any danger. A number of his poems were published in an anthology called
New Numbers.
Little notice was taken of them until on Easter Sunday, 1915, the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral quoted Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ in his sermon. As a result
The Times
of London reprinted the poem, which gave Brooke a much wider audience. A week later his death was reported. It wasn’t a ‘glamorous’ death, for he had died from blood poisoning in the Aegean; he had not been killed in the fighting, but he had been on active service, on his way to Gallipoli, and the news turned him into a hero.
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Several people, including his fellow poet Ivor Gurney, have remarked that Brooke’s poetry is less about war than about what the English felt – or wanted to feel – about the events of the early months of the war.
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In other words, they tell us more about the popular state of mind in England than about Brooke’s own experience of fighting in the war at the front. His most famous is ‘The Soldier’ (1914):

Robert Graves,
born in Wimbledon in 1895, was the son of the Irish poet Alfred Perceval Graves. While serving in France, he was wounded, lay unconscious on a stretcher in a converted German dressing station, and was given up for dead.
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Graves was always interested in mythology, and his verse was curiously distant and uncomfortable. One of his poems describes the first corpse he had seen – a German dead on the trench wire whom, therefore, Graves couldn’t bury. This was hardly propaganda poetry, and indeed many of Graves’s stanzas rail against the stupidity and bureaucratic futility of the conflict. Most powerful perhaps is his reversal of many familiar myths:

This is antiheroic, deflating and bitter. Goliath isn’t supposed to win. Graves
himself suppressed his poetry of war, though
Poems about War
was reissued after his death in 1985.
⁵⁷

Unlike Brooke and Graves, Isaac Rosenberg did not come from a middle-class, public school background, nor had he grown up in the country. He was born into a poor Jewish family in Bristol and spent his childhood in London’s East End, suffering indifferent health.
⁵⁸
He left school at fourteen, and some wealthy friends who recognised his talents paid for him to attend the Slade School to learn painting, where he met David Bomberg, C. R. W. Nevinson, and Stanley Spencer.
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He joined the army, he said, not for patriotic reasons but because his mother would benefit from the separation allowance. He found army life irksome and never rose above private. But never having been schooled in any poetic tradition, he approached the war in a particular way. He kept art and life separate and did not try to turn the war into metaphor; rather he grappled with the unusual images it offered to re-create the experience of war, which is a part of life and yet not part of most people’s lives:

And later,

Above all, you are
with
Rosenberg. The rat, skittering through no-man’s-land with a freedom no man enjoys, the poppies, drawing life from the blood-sodden ground, are powerful as images, but it is the immediacy of the situation that is conveyed. As he said in a letter, his style was ‘surely as simple as ordinary talk.’
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Rosenberg’s is an unflinching gaze, but it is also understated. The horror speaks for itself. This is perhaps why Rosenberg’s verse has lost less of its power than other war poems as the years have gone by. He was killed on April Fool’s Day, 1918.

Wilfred Owen is generally regarded as Rosenberg’s only equal, and maybe even his superior. Born in Oswestry in Shropshire in 1893, into a religious, traditional family, Owen was twenty-one when war was declared.
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After matriculating at London University, he became the pupil and lay assistant to a vicar in an Oxfordshire village, then obtained a post as a tutor in English at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux. In 1914, after war broke out, he witnessed the first French casualties arriving at the hospital in Bordeaux and wrote home to his mother vividly describing their wounds and his pity. In
October 1915 he was accepted for the Artists’ Rifles (imagine a regiment with that name now) but was commissioned in the Manchester Regiment. He sailed to France on active service at the end of December 1916, attached to the Lancashire Fusiliers. By then, the situation at the front was in strong contrast to the image of the front being kept alive by government propaganda back home.

Owen’s first tour of duty on the Somme was an overwhelming experience, as his letters make clear, and he went through a rapid and remarkable period of maturing. He was injured in March 1917 and invalided home via a series of hospitals, until he ended up in June in Craiglockhart Hospital outside Edinburgh, which, says his biographer, ‘was the most considerable watershed in Wilfred’s short life.’
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This was the famous psychiatric hospital where W. H. Rivers, one of the medical staff, was making early studies, and cures, of shell shock. While at Craiglockhart, Owen met Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon, who both left a record of the encounter in their memoirs. Sassoon’s
Siegfried’s Journey
(not published until 1948) has this to say about their poetry: ‘My trench sketches were like rockets, sent up to illuminate the darkness. They were the first of their kind, and could claim to be opportune. It was Owen who revealed how, out of realistic horror and scorn, poetry might be made.’
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Owen went back to the front in September 1918, partly because he believed in that way he might argue more forcefully against the war. In October he won the Military Cross for his part in a successful attack on the Beaurevoir-Fonsomme line. It was during his final year that his best poems were composed. In ‘Futility’ (1918), Owen is light years away from Brooke and very far even from Rosenberg. He paints a savage picture of the soldier’s world, a world very different from anything his readers back home would have ever encountered. His target is the destruction of youth, the slaughter, the maiming, the sense that it might go on for ever, while at the same time he discovers a language wherein the horror may be shown in a clear, beautiful, but always terrible way:

In poems like ‘The Sentry’ and ‘Counter-Attack,’ the physical conditions
and the terror are locked into the words; carnage can occur at any moment.

For Owen the war can never be a metaphor for anything – it is too big, too horrific, to be anything other than itself. His poems need to be read for their cumulative effect. They are not rockets ‘illuminating the darkness’ (as Sassoon described his own work), but rather like heavy artillery shells, pitting the landscape with continual bombardment. The country has failed Owen; so has the church; so – he fears – has he failed himself. All that is left is the experience of war.
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Owen saw himself, in Bernard Bergonzi’s felicitous phrase, as both priest and victim. W. B. Yeats notoriously left him out of the
Oxford Book of Modern Verse
(1936) with the verdict that ‘passive suffering was not a proper subject for poetry,’ a spiteful remark that some critics have put down to jealousy. Owen’s verse has certainly lasted. He was killed in action, trying to get his men across the Sambre Canal. It was 4 November 1918, and the war had less than a week to go.

The war in many ways changed incontrovertibly the way we think and what we think about. In 1975, in
The Great War and Modern Memory,
Paul Fussell, then a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and now at the University of Pennsylvania, explored some of these changes. After the war the idea of progress was reversed, for many a belief in God was no longer sustainable, and irony – a form of distance from feeling – ‘entered the modern soul as a permanent resident.’
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Fussell also dates what he calls ‘the modern
versus
habit’ to the war – that is, a dissolution of ambiguity as a thing to be valued, to be replaced instead by ‘a sense of polarity’ where the enemy is so wicked that his position is deemed a flaw or perversion, so that ‘its total submission is called for.’ He noted the heightened erotic sense of the British during the war, one aspect being the number of women who had lost lovers at the front and who
came together afterward to form lesbian couples – a common sight in the 1920s and 1930s. In turn, this pattern may have contributed to a general view that female homosexuality was more unusual in its aetiology than is in fact the case. But it may have made lesbianism more acceptable as a result, being overlaid with sympathy and grief.

Building on the work of Fussell, Jay Winter, in
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning
(1995), made the point that the apocalyptic nature of the carnage and the unprecedented amount of bereavement that it caused drove many people away from the novelties of modernism – abstraction,
vers libre
, atonalism and the rest – and back to more traditional forms of expression.
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War memorials in particular were realistic, simple, conservative. Even the arts produced by avant-gardists – Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Stanley Spencer, and even Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso in their collaboration with Erik Satie on his modernist ballet
Parade
(1917) – fell back on traditional and even Christian images and themes as the only narratives and myths that could make sense of the overwhelming nature of ‘a massive problem shared.’
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In France, there was a resurgence
of images d’Epinal,
pietistic posters that had not been popular since the early nineteenth century, and a reappearance of apocalyptic, ‘unmodern’ literature, especially but not only in France: Henri Barbusse’s
Le Feu
and Karl Kraus’s
Last Days of Mankind
are two examples. Despite its being denounced by the Holy See, there was a huge increase in spiritualism as an attempt to talk to the dead. And this was not merely a fad among the less well educated. In France the Institut Métaphysique was headed by Charles Richet, Nobel Prize-winning physiologist, while in Britain the president of the Society for Psychical Research was Sir Oliver Lodge, professor of physics at Liverpool University and later principal of Birmingham University.
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Winter included in his book ‘spirit photographs’ taken at the Remembrance Day ceremony in Whitehall in 1922, when the dead allegedly appeared to watch the proceedings. Abel Gance used a similar approach in one of the great postwar films,
J’accuse
(1919), in which the dead in a battlefield graveyard rise up with their bandages and crutches and walking sticks and return to their villages, to see if their sacrifices were worth it: ‘The sight of the fallen so terrifies the townspeople that they immediately mend their ways, and the dead return to their graves, their mission fulfilled.’
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They were easily satisfied.