War is Hell

The disillusionment of war is nothing new. Last week in Brit Lit we looked at "Voices from World War I." Dr. Hares-Stryker showed us clips from a WWI documentary to make certain that we were all familiar with the horrors of trench warfare. Britain's army was entirely voluntary--amazing, when you think that 780,000 of them lost their lives during the Great War, almost an entire generation of young men. A remarkable public statement made by poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), while recovering from a bullet wound in 1917, has the ring of familiarity:

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, conviced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

The poetry of British soldiers like Sassoon and Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) captures the disconnect between the noble post-Victorian ideals about war, and the harsh reality of an industrialized war of attrition. I was struck by how frequently--and appropriately--they use the word "hell."

Glory of Women
Siegfried Sassoon

You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.
You can't believe that British troops "retire"
When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses--blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
(1918)

Futility
Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun--
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
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 of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this day the clay grew tall?
--O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
to break earth's sleep at all?
(1920)