“There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry.”
– Ernest Hemingway, in “Men at War”
29th July 1914, the beginning of the end for many. The day the Great War officially began. There was no single factor that led to this day; there was no “ceterus paribus” in the bloody pages of history. But the final push, the last nudge that tipped the scales in favor of downright macabre was perhaps the assassination of the Austria-Hungary Archduke Ferdinand in June 1914. This set off a diplomatic crisis, since Austria- Hungary delivered an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia. Immediately in the following weeks international alliances were invoked and the major powers made way to undoing the world financially and emotionally.
The trench war method was witnessed for the first time in this particular war. Battle plans and strategies were observed through a network of dug fortifications which were constructed at and below ground level. This specific method of battle ensured constricted mobility along almost all battlefield fronts and hence resulted in stalemates that lasted for the better part of the war, especially at the western front. The trench network was quite thorough since the soldiers were expected to eat, sleep and rest in them for the duration of their stay on the field.
Some of the best poetic accounts of the Great War were those directly from the trenches. The reason behind this fact is quite sobering, the soldiers in these trenches were frequented most by distress, agony, depression, death, stench, decaying bodies and the numerous other horrors of war. This combination of harrowing experiences in the trench method of war gave birth to Trench Poets: soldiers who would write out their pain and suffering and frustration and loss and desperation, soldiers who would try to come to terms with their realities, soldiers who would set aside the gun for awhile and with a pen, go to war with their predicament- soldiers who became poets.
Over the years, authors have tried to explain why is it that literature, with special attention to poetry, is as majorly associated with the First World War and not the other wars as much. From the first week, the 1914-18 war inspired enormous quantities of poetry and fiction. The claim that three million war poems were written in Germany in the first six months of hostilities might be farfetched, but Catherine W. Reilly has counted 2,225 English poets of the Great War, and the listing of wartime poets writing in French in Jean Vic’s La Literature de la Guerre runs to eighteen pages (Harvey). These numbers come with significance because even though the earlier wars of 1792-1815 were profoundly more damaging in terms of capital and human lives, the First World War is still considered the larger literary event.
It is difficult to validate that popular chauvinism was stronger, deeper or more widespread in 1914 than it had been a hundred years earlier(1815 napoleon wars), but a good case can be made for arguing that when the First World War began, the literary and intellectual climate was much more favorable to war literature than in any earlier period. Fueling the spirit of the poets was the idea to become the sole national poet in the crisis, so much so that William Watson (then an esteemed poet, today virtually forgotten) wanted to document the evidence of the war with such determination to become a national hero that he had sixteen different war poems printed in various newspapers in the first six weeks (Harvey).
Concluding the literary spirit seen during the First World War, by the time the 1939-45 war began, the artistic and literary innovations which were seen during the early years of the 20th century were wearing. But perhaps, more importantly, the battlefield horrors and atrocities which had a great novelty during the Great War were now terribly familiar. As poet Keith Douglas puts it:
“Hell cannot be let loose twice: it was let loose in the Great War and it is the same old hell now, The hardships, pain and boredom, the behavior of the living and the appearance of the dead, were so accurately described by the poets of the Great War that every day on the battlefields of the western desert – and no doubt on the Russian battlefields as well – their poems are illustrated.” (Mackay)
So according to Douglas’s statement, the Russian battlefields were shattered portraits of hope building upon the decaying human bodies, painted with the bleakness of sorrow and despair and the longing of going back in time and wishing to have wished differently-
“A short life and a merry one, my brick!
We used to say we’d hate to live dead old, –
Yet now . . . I’d willingly be puffy, bald… (Owen)”
-like Wilfred Owen would put it from his time during the Great War.
Wilfred Owen was tutoring in Pyrenees when war was declared and shortly afterwards, he enlisted himself. In 1917, he suffered from “trench fever” while fighting at Somme and was sent to spend time at the Craiglockhart hospital. It was there that he met Siegfried Sassoon who read Owen’s poems and mentored him on how to improve them. Owen didn’t live to see the post-war reality so, though his works got confined to the war realities only, he is still deemed as one of the memorable Trench poets.
Owen is distinguished from Sassoon and Graves because of his compassionate tone in his poetry. “Shy, sensitive, and intense,” in his work Owen combined “Victorian and early twentieth century homoeroticism” with sensitive and ghastly impressions of the war’s destruction (Fussell). Owen was versatile in his writing in the sense that he chose different angles and different subjects to write about, for instance where on one hand he describes a new piece of artillery in a Sonnet as:
Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,
Great Gun towering towards Heaven, about to curse;
Sway steep against them, and for years rehearse
Huge imprecations like a blasting charm!(Owen, Sonnet: On Seeing A Piece Of Our Heavy Artillery Brought Into Action)
-on the other hand he attempts to be the speaker of the dead in his “Anthem for Doomed Youth”. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ is the best example to show the compassionate tone of Owen as a writer, for he talks about the conditions of the battlefield while contrasting it with the otherwise traditional pre-war situations he remembered.
What Owen’s collection lacks is the post war experiences of survivors and civilians. These were captured by Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves- both of whom are also well known for putting trench warfare to paper.
Sassoon was perhaps the most innocent of the war poets, who is also known as the accidental hero because his upbringing was very much that of a pastoral squire’s. Being an innocent, Sassoon’s reaction to the war realities was more violent and bitter- both, in his writing and on the battlefield as well. He was called the “Mad Jack” by those who were under his command because of his dangerous exploits on the battlefield. Although Sassoon survived the war, he never escaped; as Paul Fussell suggests, Sassoon spent the second half of his life memoir-izing the first, citing “[his own] queer craving to revisit the past and give the modern world the slip (Fussell)”.
Sassoon’s poetry is the ultimate expression of the rollercoaster of emotions a trench soldier would face; his poems, such as “Base Details,” “Lamentations,” and “Does it Matter” display Sassoon’s talent for bitter irony and a sudden twist ending, while others - “Glory of Women” and “Repression of War Experience”- clearly convey Sassoon’s unbridled disgust for those who remained at home, whether by their own choice or not.
What’s more is that Sassoon’s poetry is unrelentingly realistic and the reader cannot even doubt the authenticity of the accounts mentioned is his poems to be anything but firsthand experience. Like, for instance, in “A Working Party”-
“He pushed another bag along the top,
Craning his body outward; then a flare
Gave one white glimpse of No Man’s Land and wire;
And as he dropped his head the instant split”
-Sassoon is seen talking about a soldier in the trench who was blown up while on duty. We know it is credible for a very specific past –“3 hours ago”- was mentioned by Sassoon at the start of this particular poem. Not only this but this poem also sheds light on the deceased’s family life and soon afterwards, the reader is transported into the mind of the soldier of how slow he thought that the time was moving. Not very surprisingly, Sassoon ends the story with the sudden death of the soldier, rather making the reader see the details of it, since only oblivion lies at the wrong side of being blown apart.
Similarly, in “The rank stench of those bodies still haunt me” we see the narrator, most probably same as the author, walking through a medical camp where he notices how relieved the soldiers look lying on their beds, where only days ago they might have been in the constant fear of death. This poem particularly displays the human condition of standing in the present and pondering over how one reached here and at what costs.
On the contrary, if we turn to “Base Details”, a pithy poem of ten lines, we shall find a poetic voice quite unlike that of “A Working Party”. The title itself has a double meaning, which links it to titles like “A Working Party” or “The Death Bed” or “Counter Attack”, all of which are deceptive in their simple descriptiveness since the circumstances and events described in these poems are not simple at all. In this poem’s context, “base” could be used in one of two ways; as a noun meaning a military base of operations, or as an adjective, signaling “details” that are dishonorable or vile.
“Base Details” is a scathingly satirical account of the lives of those higher in position in the military. In this poem particularly, Sassoon believes that had he been an older man in the ranks, he would assign young soldiers to the “line of death” and then remark on the heavy loss “in this last scrap” while reading out the roll of honor but resume to living peacefully after the war ended, and die a peaceful death in his bed only. This pretty much sums up the sentiments of hatred the trench soldiers and those on the front line seem to have about those seniors who sit back and order the front liners. Also, in this, like in the “Glory of Women”, Sassoon makes his contempt and disgust for those not part in the fighting directly very evident.
It is impossible not to respect the immediacy and earnestness with which these poets tried to express their war experiences. Writing with clarity, emotion, and even beauty about the fathomable horrors they saw somehow legitimized their experiences. They passed it on to future generations as a reminder of what awaits at the other end of the war. And thus urged readers then and now to feel what these part soldier part poets faced each day. In effect, these poets asked their readers to look into their consciences and ask the questions that were avoided throughout the course of the war; can one party be blamed completely and is ten million the human cost we are willing to pay for the ludicrous game play of diplomacy?
Important as those questions are, we must look beyond the war poets and bring into focus the accounts of survivors and the aftermath of the Great War on the society as a whole. In this regard, we have T S Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hollow Men which are unconditionally two of the best modernist works dealing with the Great War and its repercussions.
The Waste Land is a maze of allusions-classical and modern- and also includes multicultural themes, with the aid of using different languages spoken around the globe; these techniques helped him universalize the loss and pain of the war victims, and talk about the social dilemma the great war brought with it for Europe in a way that it could be felt by every individual in any continent. Eliot’s account of the war is a tragedy visibly different from those of the war poets since he was not actively part of the war and therefore couldn’t talk about the frontline sufferings. However, his sense of loss came from the death of Gallipoli, his friend from his time as a student in France.
The Waste Land is divided into 5 sections, but I would emphasize on the first 2: the burial of the dead and a game of chess.
APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
The Burial of the Dead starts with the most famous line of the modern poetry. But it goes on to uniquely describe a bereaved man who sees lilacs growing out of the dead land as an unwelcome reminder of a supposedly jubilant past. It then flows into talking from the perspective of the dead who are buried under the ground, though covered with “Winter snow” are in a much warmer place, since they don’t have to live through the barrenness of the life above the ground. This juxtaposition of a contending winter with a cruel spring contrasts the general human experience. Without changing the voice, Eliot then uses the mask of Marie, an aristocratic Austrian, to talk about the idyllic time before the war and mentions the death of the “cousin” which was the Archduke Ferdinand.
The most intriguing part of the Waste Land is Eliot’s vision of the dead walking on the London Bridge:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
. . .
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him crying: ‘Stetson!
4 German, “How wide and empty the sea”
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
At this point, the imagery at the opening of the poem (the mention of the corpses in the garden and the frost) is accompanied by the eerie spectacle of dead people traversing the bridge. Does the possibility exist that Eliot was faced with survivor’s guilt because death had “undone so many” and just passed over him? Eliot does not talk about the war difficulties or the life in the trenches since he was not part of the war, but he talks about the war victims, the survivors and the wasteland which is the land unfertilized by the effects of war in milieu of London- where he is.
While the Burial of the Dead deals with the deadness of the waste land, A Game of Chess touches upon the idea of sterility using 3 different approaches: concrete details of an actual waste land, a conversation between two women and a conversation between a man and a woman.
The conversation between two women is in a bar where the bartender calls upon the closing and one woman narrates her conversation with Lil to the other women. The conversation is about the woman suggesting Lil to have new teeth placed to please her husband who has been in the “army for four years”, and Lil tries to explain that her “antique look is not because of worn out teeth but because of the medicines she took for an abortion. Eliot here suggests the idea of sterility by showing weariness in the relationship of a soldier husband and his wife caused by the war and hints using the voice of the narrator that the relationship of marriage can be rekindled using intimacy but then, why go through the painful process to bear a child to this waste land.
For the first 33 lines of A Game of Chess, we see a woman of the elitist aura asking her husband to speak, to think. And the husband’s inner voice says to himself:
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
One wonders why would Eliot give a reference of the life in the trenches to describe the thoughts of the man. It might be because of Eliot’s belief that the post-war England was in its death-throes whether because of regret or remorse or guilt. The desire to stay alive was lost, according to Eliot and therefore, a miserable death was warmly welcomed.
The woman keeps chattering and the man does nothing to remove himself of her but nothing whatsoever to relate to her. The complete breakdown of relations is clear when the man says:
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a
knock upon the door.
They wait; like the people of Europe waited, for the misery of war to get over, even if it were by a knock by death.
The rather pessimistic view of wartime and the post-war British society shared by the poets of the modernist time begins to diminish, until the immediate post-war years become a method of soul-searching and self awakening in the minds of the later authors. Which validates, that The Great War was still alive in Literature even after years of the end.
