Some Desperate Glory (22 page)

The way to the front went through Etaples, then to Amiens to join his battalion and from Amiens to Vendelles before preparations for an attack. In France Owen completed ‘The Sentry', ‘Exposure' and ‘Spring Offensive'. Of the fighting, he told his mother, ‘I lost all my earthly faculties, and fought like an angel.' Doubts about his courage vanished when, with a corporal, he captured a German machine-gun post, writing that ‘I only shot one man with my revolver (at about 30 yards!). The rest I took with a smile.' Wilfred Owen won a Military Cross.

He knew that he had a mission now, to care for and to record what his men endured, how ‘every word, every figure of speech must be matter of experience', must be conveyed so that any soldier could understand. ‘I came out in order to help these boys,' he told his mother, ‘directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as a pleader can. I have done the first.' What he wrote would fulfil the second.

The end came on 4 November, during an attack across the Sambre–Oise canal when three Victoria Crosses were won. Owen was last seen trying to cross the canal on a raft under heavy enemy fire. The engagement was his unit's last time in action, the heroism perhaps encouraged by a sense that victory was near. Showing the static nature of the western front, the 2nd Manchesters found themselves on Armistice Day – 11 November 1918 – in billets to the south of Landrecies, where they'd been on 18 August 1914, on their way to Mons.

The confirmation of Owen's Military Cross occurred some four days after he had been killed. One of the myths of the armistice is of the bells of Shrewsbury ringing out in celebration as the telegram boy knocked on the door of the Owen home with the news of Wilfred's death. It's ironic that the last letter to his mother from a poet whose work shows so powerfully the pain of war should say, ‘It is a great life … Of this I am certain, you could not be visited by a band of friends so fine as surround me here.'

There was muted joy for the poets when victory came. On 11 November, Siegfried Sassoon was staying with the Morrells at Garsington, in a literary house party. The four years had transformed him from a shy, obscure, fox-hunting versifier into a poet and hero, the prey of lion hunters. Relieved to be alone in nearby water meadows when the church bells rang, he went later that day to a rainy, hysterical London, attending a dinner party where the guests, mostly non-combatants, exhibited the same patriotic ecstasy as the crowds outside. To Sassoon, the festivities seemed ‘a loathsome ending to the loathsome tragedy of the last four years'.

Edmund Blunden, now married to a Suffolk girl, was about to cross the Channel for the first time since February, expecting to see more fighting. Instead he became part of the forces of peace and, billeted near Arras later that year, reached into a recess beside his bed and found a book: Edward Thomas's study of John Keats. Thomas had been killed near by in 1917. Could it be the author's own copy? Holding the book, Blunden imagined ‘the tall, Shelley-like figure of the poet gathering together his equipment for the last time, hastening out of this ruined building to join his men and march into battle…'.

Ivor Gurney was at home in Gloucester, increasingly resented by his family as one who couldn't (or wouldn't) help himself after a mental breakdown. He'd been in England since September 1917 and the gassing, obviously unfit for the front, his despair great enough in June 1918 for him to write to Marion Scott from a hospital in Warrington to say that he would kill himself.

Clearly he'd had another breakdown, reverting to his disturbed and wayward pre-war state. The symptoms were a mixture of self-starvation and compulsive eating, also voices in the head – perhaps a legacy from his work as a signaller – and garbled references to some hurtful incident in the Bangour hospital during the last months of 1917. Work in the Gloucester docks and a munitions factory helped, after his release from hospital. On 2 November he told Marion Scott, ‘I am glad to tell you that I am better myself, after a fortnight's hauling of heavy things…' But the atmosphere at home was so tense that he thought of going away to sea.

For Gurney, the armistice coincided with at least some good news: that he would get a small war pension; that his first book,
Severn and Somme
, was to be reprinted; that Sidgwick and Jackson would publish
War's Embers
. As if in response, his music and poetry poured forth while his family, whom he hardly mentions in his letters, became even more estranged from him.

Robert Graves, unfit for front-line service since his wound in July 1916, had been training recruits or performing garrison duties in depots at Litherland, Oswestry and Rhyl. A possible posting to Egypt or Gibraltar didn't happen but marriage did, and Graves wrote almost apologetically to Sassoon about his new wife Nancy Nicholson (who became pregnant in May 1918), telling also of his plans for post-war farming with which ‘you'll have to promise to help us out if we get into a hole, with some of your Persian gold'. Resentment at such requests comes in Sassoon's verse letter with the line, ‘Why keep a Jewish friend unless you bleed him?' He thought Graves's recent poems were too soft, implying that marriage had been bad for the poet. On Armistice Day, the Graveses were living in a cottage in Rhuddlan, and Robert walked alone over the Welsh hills, ‘cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead'.

Robert Nichols was in New York on 11 November, lecturing on shell shock and poetry on a tour arranged by the British Foreign Office to foster closer relations between the Allies. Nichols read his own work and that of Graves, Sassoon and Charles Sorley, thinking the city beautiful but American women like ‘icebergs'. The poet had at least one fan: the rich Mrs Lamont who believed in his genius, found the war poets fascinating and was coming to England. She would, Nichols told Marsh, ‘very much I think like to meet Siegfried if she can – do you think you could manage it?' This was the poet as Byron – a romance of danger, suffering, courage and youthful sacrifice: a rare English epic, strengthening as, gradually, the myths of the war began.

 

1918 POEMS

 

‘
Insensibility
' – Wilfred Owen

‘
Dulce et Decorum Est
' – Wilfred Owen

‘
Strange Meeting
– Wilfred Owen

‘
The Secret
' – Robert Nichols

‘
Through These Pale Cold Days
' – Isaac Rosenberg

‘
Exposure
' – Wilfred Owen

‘
Dawn on the Somme
' – Robert Nichols

‘
Arms and the Boy
' – Wilfred Owen

‘
Futility
' – Wilfred Owen

‘
Preface
' – Wilfred Owen

‘
A Terre
' – Wilfred Owen

‘
Disabled
' – Wilfred Owen

‘
Letter to Robert Graves
' – Siegfried Sassoon

‘
Crickley Hill
' – Ivor Gurney

 

 

Insensibility

1

 

Happy are men who yet before they are killed

Can let their veins run cold.

Whom no compassion fleers

Or makes their feet

Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.

The front line withers.

But they are troops who fade, not flowers,

For poets' tearful fooling:

Men, gaps for filling:

Losses, who might have fought

Longer; but no one bothers.

2

And some cease feeling

Even themselves or for themselves.

Dullness best solves

The tease and doubt of shelling,

And Chance's strange arithmetic

Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.

They keep no check on armies' decimation.

3

Happy are these who lose imagination:

They have enough to carry with ammunition.

Their spirit drags no pack.

Their old wounds save with cold can not more ache.

Having seen all things red,

Their eyes are rid

Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.

And terror's first constriction over,

Their hearts remain small-drawn.

Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle

Now long since ironed,

Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.

4

Happy the soldier home, with not a notion

How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,

And many sighs are drained.

Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:

His days are worth forgetting more than not.

He sings along the march

Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,

The long, forlorn, relentless trend

From larger day to huger night.

5

We wise, who with a thought besmirch

Blood over all our soul,

How should we see our task

But through his blunt and lashless eyes?

Alive, he is not vital overmuch;

Dying, not mortal overmuch;

Nor sad, nor proud,

Nor curious at all.

He cannot tell

Old men's placidity from his.

6

But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,

That they should be as stones.

Wretched are they, and mean

With paucity that never was simplicity.

By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever mourns in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares

The eternal reciprocity of tears.

W
ILFRED
O
WEN

 

 

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

 

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,

And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime …

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

 

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

 

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –

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.

W
ILFRED
O
WEN

 

 

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 the 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 if 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 and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now…'

W
ILFRED
O
WEN

 

 

The Secret

Suddenly with a shy, sad grace

She turns to me her lighted face,

And I who hear some idle phrase