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.’62 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.’63 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:
Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds –
Woke, once, the clays o f a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved – still warm – too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
– O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
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.
We’d found an old Boche dug out, and he knew,
And gave us hell; for shell on frantic shell
Lit full on top, but never quite burst through.
Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime,
Kept slush waist-high and rising hour by hour
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.64
I have made fellowships –
Untold of happy lovers in old song.
For love is not the binding of fair lips
With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,
By Joy, whose ribbon slips, –
But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong;
Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;
Knit in the webbing of the rifle-thong.
–Apologia Pro Poemate Meo, 1917
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.’65 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.66 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.’67 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.68 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.’69 They were easily satisfied.