Some Desperate Glory (27 page)

By then, there'd been another war. The Second World War felt different; earlier poets had already written about the shock of mass warfare: also there was no doubt that Nazi Germany had to be beaten. Alan Ross, a young poet who joined the navy, wrote that ‘acceptance rather than protest on the Sassoon and Owen level was the only valid response', and this made for a less emotional or angry poetry. One British poet who wrote about the fighting was Keith Douglas. Douglas relished battle, like Julian Grenfell, but saw the hopelessness of the brave amateurism of young Grenfell-like officers. His poem ‘Aristocrats' expresses pity, not anger, at their innocence and faith.

British poets of the Second World War wrote mostly in a traditional way, like their First War predecessors. In the 1950s, the hold of modernism weakened further when new writers like Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis rebelled against obscurity, metropolitan sophistication, Pound, Eliot and foreign influence. But the inspiration now was more likely to be not a lost pastoral England (although there were glimpses of it) but northern provincial towns. Philip Larkin, however, pleased Sassoon by telling him in a letter of his dislike of ‘symbolic poetry, or poetry full of quotations from other writers and other languages. I think sometimes it was an evil day when English poetry fell into the hands of the Americans and the Irish. From which you may gather that Pound and Eliot and Joyce are not my favourite authors.' Larkin's ‘MCMXIV', about England on the eve of the First World War, shows a country about to lose that innocence to which Sassoon looked longingly back. In his 1973
Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse
Larkin went against Yeats's earlier judgement by including seven poems by Owen (but not ‘Strange Meeting', perhaps because it was thought by some to be unfinished). Also in were Brooke's ‘The Soldier', Edward Thomas's ‘As the Team's Head-Brass' and ‘In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)'.

Robert Graves returned to England when the Second World War began. He lived in the west country and joined the Home Guard, going back to Majorca when peace came. England was (he said) always his poetic inspiration, and the welterweight boxing cup from Charterhouse stayed on his desk. Graves didn't write much about Spain or Majorca, except in the olive groves of his love poetry. In 1969, he said of his war poems, ‘I destroyed them. They were journalistic.' He passed judgement on Sassoon and Owen, the characteristically plain speaking becoming even plainer. ‘Owen and Sassoon were homosexuals, though Sassoon tried to think he wasn't. To them, seeing men killed was as horrible as if you or I had to see fields of corpses of women.' That year he told the comedian Spike Milligan that ‘Sassoon's idealism, like Wilfred Owen's, was mixed up with homosexuality. They killed to prove their manhood, wept because of their womanhood for the corpses they left in their trail.' Sassoon's view of Graves in 1962 was ‘How right dear Robbie Ross was when he said that “Robert is half school-boy and half school-master.”'

Robert Graves remained proud that he'd fought. In 1968, he wrote that a compromise peace had been impossible because of German atrocities. The war's worst horror had been Haig's 1917 offensive – the third battle of Ypres or Passchendaele – ‘the most unspeakably horrible, pointless, and costly campaign ever fought by British troops'. For Graves, however, the war had ‘given me not only an unsurpassable standard of danger, discomfort, and horror by which to judge more recent troubles, but a confidence in the golden-heartedness and iron endurance of my fellow countrymen (proved again in Hitler's war), which even the laxity of this new plastic age cannot disturb'. Like Blunden, he remembered the virtues of that terrifying time.

Siegfried Sassoon wanted people to read the devotional poems inspired by his conversion to Catholicism rather than his writings about the First World War. The others show how hard it was to leave such an ordeal. Nichols never recovered from shell shock and Gurney's and Blunden's post-war poetry shows the strength of memory. Graves tried harder to move on. He set up a court in exile, explored myth and feminine power, believing that poetry was magical, that reality and literal truth were not poetic. Avoiding the political themes of the 1930s or social comment, he became dismissive of
Goodbye to All That
, declaring that it had been written for money: that was why he put in what he thought were commercial subjects – kings, mothers, food, ghosts and poets (‘People like reading about poets. I put in a lot of poets'). The book isn't an anti-war book, its author said, but a history of what had happened to him during the war.

Edmund Blunden went back most years to Flanders. On one of his last visits, he sat on a hill above Ancre with his young wife Claire, sensing old terrors behind the now peaceful scene. That year, Blunden represented tradition in an election for Oxford's professorship of poetry, standing against the American (and favourite of the 1960s) Robert Lowell. It was Blunden who won, Lowell graciously declaring admiration for his opponent's work. But the new professor was already ill, suffering from the aftermath of wartime gas attacks, and found the lecturing a dreadful burden, so he gave up the post. A year later, he was back on the western front, again with Claire, writing to Sassoon that there had been ‘many thoughts and mentions of you'. He knew that Siegfried Sassoon, one of the few left who understood what the war had been like, was dying.

In September 1967, after a Roman Catholic funeral, Sassoon was buried at Mells, in an Anglican churchyard, near the medieval manor house, as if to assert the England that pervades much of his later work. Blunden followed seven years later; his grave is at Long Melford, in the cemetery of the church there. In December 1985, Robert Graves died, on Majorca, where he is buried. At his memorial service in London later that month, the last post was played by a bugler from the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

By then, the poets' war was seen as the truth, judging by the flood of novels and films about it. This infuriated historians such as John Terraine or Correlli Barnett. Why, they asked, should what had ended in victory for the Allies be shown so often as a series of failed attacks from water-filled trenches across lunar landscapes threaded with barbed wire, in an atmosphere of dread, under the command of stupid, moustachioed, out-of-touch generals sheltering in châteaux miles to the rear? This, they claimed, was the real myth. They protested against vilification of Haig, saying that his task – of satisfying political pressure, of training the flood of volunteers and conscripts, of dislodging an enemy who had the huge advantages given to defenders by modern technology and weapons – was almost impossible.

Haig was not a great general, although his supporters have worked hard to try to make him one. Not until the last months of the war did British tactics have overwhelming success, demonstrating an exceptionally long time of learning. The war poets saw the earlier failed offensives. Only Owen was at the front for the final surge. And the historians faced a growing wave, of art and emotion. The pacifist Benjamin Britten, a conscientious objector in the Second World War, put Owen's poems into his
War Requiem
, first performed (and hailed as a masterpiece) in the new Coventry Cathedral in May 1962. A year later came a new edition of Owen's poems, edited by Cecil Day Lewis, now a best-seller. Joan Littlewood's theatrical production
Oh, What a Lovely War!
followed in 1963, using music and words, including songs from the war, to ridicule the generals and politicians, reaching large audiences six years later as a film.

Anthologies of war poetry carried the message of early illusion crumbling into the despair. In 1964,
Up the Line to Death
, the first substantial post-Second War collection, edited by Brian Gardner, took pride in digging out lesser-known poets but was dominated by Owen, Sassoon, Nichols and Rosenberg – with not much by Blunden, Thomas or Brooke and nothing by Gurney.
Men Who March Away
, published the following year and edited by Ian Parsons, followed this arc as well; again Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, more this time by Thomas, but Gurney in with only three poems. The BBC
Great War
series – one of the longest-ever television documentaries – came out in 1964. Historians were called in to advise, the commentary was objective and not mocking, the survivors interviewed were dignified, but the solemn music, grainy photographs and flickering film conveyed disaster and doom.

Class-baiting intensified the row.
Oh, What a Lovely War!
portrayed Haig and the generals as privileged, remote and stupid, and the war itself as a colossal error thrust on a guileless Europe by defunct
anciens régimes
. To others, however, it was the poets, especially those who had been to public schools, who were out of touch. Their nostalgia, their contrasting of idyllic pre-war innocence with the hellish western front, showed glib emotion, particularly when it came from rich
rentiers
like Siegfried Sassoon who'd learned unreal romantic idealism at their public schools. This was individual suffering rather than general truth, as Yeats had said. The England of Sassoon's
Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man
may have looked beautiful, but it was reeling from a long agricultural depression that drove the young into the slums of the industrial cities where life was not that much better than in the trenches.

The barrage thudded on. Defenders of Haig and the High Command said that the war should be seen from October 1918, not from 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme. The Somme was terrible for the Germans as well; even the third battle of Ypres had seen British success in the hot dry spell in September and early October 1917 under General Plumer (who looked like a caricature First War commander). The British were unique in having no pre-war conscription, in having to recruit, equip and train a massive volunteer force after the early high casualty rate suffered by the small regular army. Britain was not prepared for a large continental land war – again not the fault of the generals. It had been thought that the Royal Navy, an economic blockade and generous transfusions of cash could be Britain's contribution, with the fighting on land left mostly to her allies.

There were mistakes, not least in Haig's obstinacy and determination to go on, at the Somme and at Ypres in the autumns of 1916 and 1917. But the British army rallied after Loos in September 1915, then after the Somme's first day, then after what Blunden thought had been the worst of all, the fighting round Ypres in October and November 1917. The last months of the war, from July until November 1918, saw British victories.

What the poets wrote was seductive, often spellbindingly good, so much so that it was claimed they contributed to the climate of appeasement in the 1930s: the wish to avoid war at almost any price. It's hard to prove this; certainly they show sympathy for enemy soldiers – although never for German war aims – and Sassoon and Blunden were drawn to pre–Second World War pacifist movements like the Peace Pledge Union. War memoirs and novels were influential because of their sales, greater than poetry. More effective still was Keynes's brilliant polemic,
The
Economic Consequences of the Peace
, published in December 1919 and a best-seller all over the world. The book's argument – that the victorious powers had been much too harsh on Germany – prepared the way for a revulsion against the Treaty of Versailles (and sympathy for the German sense of injustice) a decade later.

There's the claim that Britain should never have fought at all: that by sticking to a treaty with Belgium the British prolonged the fighting (and led later to Hitler) instead of accepting as inevitable what might have been a benign German domination of continental Europe, an early version of the modern European Union. German demands on defeated Russia, and the nature of the Kaiser's neurotic and feverish regime, show this to be too optimistic.

So was the war like the 1989 television comedy
Blackadder
, with the idiotic Haig, dim generals and tragic doomed soldiers? Or was it a question of hanging on against the most powerfully militarized European power that had long prepared for a great European war? James Jack's view seems sound. Jack, who began the war as a captain and ended it commanding an infantry brigade, was a realist, certainly not a poet. The war, he knew, had been hell; he'd been in all the major battles on the western front and there should be no glorifying of it. But Jack took pride in the ‘complete' defeat of the German army. ‘The entire manhood of Germany and all her resources' had been behind the troops whose leaders had been trained to handle vast formations. Allied forces had risen above the lamentable preparations for war. It was the politicians who had put the nation in danger by ‘neglecting its armaments and the training of personnel wanted to handle them'.

Surely it's necessary to separate politics, even history, from the poetry. The work of the British First World War poets can be seen as one of the most powerful collective statements not just against what happened on the western front but against all war. But it reflects individual experience rather than objective judgement. How could it do otherwise? Every work of art is restricted by what has inspired it, and war is a more powerful restriction than most. War poetry can't be isolated from its circumstances – a limitation perhaps and also one that acts against broader historical truth.

By 1914, in Britain, poetry had become more suited to what it would need to express. The new realism of the Georgians, alongside their romance with rural life, let poets treat war and its pain realistically, without bombast, after the early burst of patriotic feeling, with the added emotional power of nostalgia. Among the downland, fields and woods of the Somme, Flanders and Picardy, the soldiers thought of the gentle rolling lands of southern England, although Graves hankered after north Wales. Dreams of pastoral calm could lessen the shock of industrial war and make its poetry stronger through contrast and emotion.