Wilfred Owen: A New Biography
By Dominic Hibberd
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002
424 pages, $59.95 (hb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
Death snatched 10 million lives in World War I but it reserved a cruel teasing for those who survived a long, five-year war only to be killed so near to its end. Wilfred Owen, 25-year-old second-lieutenant and poet, had survived bullets and bombs until November 4, 1918, when he was killed leading his platoon across the Sambre and Oise Canal in France. Seven days later, the war ended.
Owen's tragically shortened life began inauspiciously for a radical anti-war icon in Shropshire in 1893, the son of a devout mother from the Tory gentry and a patriotic father working his way up from clerk to senior management in English rail. As a teenager, Owen had imbibed the conservatism of his parents, and his school essays expressed safe patriotic platitudes ("England is the greatest and best among all countries") and correct class consciousness (railway strikes are to be deplored).
Soon after war was declared in 1914, Owen, teaching English in France and still trapped in his cocoon of middle-class establishment views, could blithely write home that "the guns will effect a little useful weeding" of the lesser classes. He subscribed to a patriotic militarism, summed up by the Latin poet Horace, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori — it is "sweet and meet", noble and proper to die for one's country.
The dismal rhymes of an early Owen poem, "The Ballad of Peace and War", exactly matched these dismal ideas:
"O meet it is and passing sweet
To live in peace with others
But sweeter still and far more meet
To die in war for brothers."
To avoid being labelled an un-patriotic "shirker", Owen enlisted in October 1915, just before conscription was introduced in England. After officer training, and a home posting in rifle instruction, second-lieutenant Owen was sent to the trenches of France in January 1917, a middle-class officer commanding a platoon of miners and factory workers from Lancashire.
The young Owen — patriotic, elitist, self-absorbed and a head filled with notions of war as a romantic adventure — was headed for a brutally fast learning curve. In the heavy rain, the sucking mud and the intense frost of the worst winter in France for 40 years, under the constant stress of booming artillery and the stealthy poison of gas attacks, Owen's illusions about war were shattered.
A sentry posted by Owen was blasted back into the platoon's trench dugout. With "eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids", the soldier piteously cried for help that would never come. A soldier, too slow with his gas mask, choked painfully to death "as under a green sea, I saw him drowning" whilst Owen was powerless to help. Owen himself was concussed and almost buried alive from a shell which exploded near his head while he was asleep. It flung him into the air and dumped him under a shower of mud.
What finally broke Owen was sheltering in a shell-hole with the remains of a fellow-officer, who lay "in various places round about" after being buried alive by one bomb and then horribly disinterred and scattered by another. Owen was diagnosed with neurasthenia — the nervous condition caused by "shell-shock" (now known as post-traumatic stress disorder) — and was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh with other neurasthenics, mute or gibbering, with severe stutters, uncontrollable trembling, rapid pulses, profuse sweating and a sense of suffocation, were afraid to go to sleep at night when their demons would resurface in violent nightmares.
Owen had met, up close, death and mental breakdown in the cause of patriotism and it was not glorious. He detested the complacency of politicians and stay-at-home warriors who covered up the truth of war, and he fumed at those "pulpit professionals" of the churches who proclaimed God was on their side. War was "horrid and un-Christian" but, at this stage, Owen could see no alternative to continuing to batter away at the enemy until military victory was won.
Hating war, but not yet ready to protest, Owen was languishing in hospital writing a long pseudo-medieval ballad. Then he met second-lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon, like Owen a poet and gay. Sassoon had spoken out, via the newspapers and through a pacifist member of parliament, against a "war of aggression and conquest", a dirty slaughter waged for "ends evil and unjust". This dissident political protest had earned Sassoon a spell in the same psychiatric hospital as Owen.
Sassoon's poems of trench life and anti-war political satire excited Owen and stimulated him to use poetry to speak out on behalf of the suffering and dying soldiers. Owen profoundly changed his style, now basing his poems on concrete experience and using a language that every soldier could understand.
His more energetic lines now expressed the horror of a war being waged with the bodies and minds of "beautiful youths now in hell". But, first, Owen contemplated returning to the front. His commanding officer had once made a slighting remark that Owen's nerve "had failed" on the battlefield and Owen felt this slur of cowardice threatened his credibility as an anti-war soldier-poet — war heroes, not "cowards", are listened to, he felt.
When Owen was passed fit for a return to the front, he wrote to his brother: "I know I shall be killed. But it is the only place I can make my protest from".
Returning to France, Owen was soon cradling a dying friend, shot in the head. This seems to have sparked an act of "battle madness" from the anti-war, semi-pacifist poet. He captured a German machine-gun post, which he used to kill many German soldiers.
Decorated with a Military Cross, Owen felt his authority as a soldier assured, and he prepared what were to be his last poems in deepening anger at a war kept going by politicians for their own ends, preventing a peaceful German retreat and thus "sacrificing aged French peasants and charming French children to our guns".
Owen's last poems are more explicitly satirical and politically subversive. "Smile, Smile, Smile" focuses on a group of wounded soldiers reading the latest drivel from the Daily Mail:
"The casualties (typed small)
And (large) Vast Booty from our Latest Haul."
Owen exposes the nationalism which simultaneously embraces the soldiers and exploits them for the interests (booty) of their rulers at home. Owen's patriotism had by now completely evaporated ("the Germans are no more to blame for the war than the Allies", he wrote) and, though not a socialist, he was moving to a view that counterposed working-class internationalism to a war-mongering ruling class nationalism.
Where Owen might have taken these ideas we shall never know because he was killed in one of the last military actions of the war. Only five of his poems, and none of his anti-war poems, had been published in his life-time. His protest had not been heard above the roar of the guns and the babble from pulpit, parliament and press. Although Sassoon published a volume of Owen's war poetry in 1920, the literary establishment conspired to marginalise Owen for decades.
William Butler Yeats, for example, banished Owen from the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which he edited in 1936, as "unworthy of the poet's corner of a country newspaper". Owen was "all blood, dirt and sucked sugar-stick", wrote Yeats, distastefully dismissing Owen's graphic depiction of the horror of war as "unliterary" and writing off Owen's pity and tenderness for the suffering of soldiers as sickly sentimentality.
How wrong Yeats was was shown by the rediscovery of Owen by the young generation of the 1960s as they were opposing yet another filthy war of imperialist aggression in Vietnam.
With war hysteria and the "national interest" again rampant today under a belligerent US imperialism, Owen's moving portrait of the horror of war, his fierce compassion for its victims and his biting criticism of patriotism and militarism still speak with the power of truth.
When guns spit death for empire, it is not "sweet and meet" to be killed for one's country, nor is it fitting and noble to kill for it either. As Owen's powerful poems remind us, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori was "the old lie" of imperialist war and patriotism in ancient Rome, as it was in 1914-18 and as it is today.
From Green Left Weekly, April 16, 2003.
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