November 4, 1918—Only a week from the end of the war that laid waste to an entire generation of European youth, 25-year-old Wilfred Owen—a recent winner of Britain’s Military Cross for courage and leadership—lost his life in the battle to cross the Sambre-Oise canal at Ors in northern France. Only five of the searing war poems that would make him famous had been published to that point.
Over the years, I’ve come to feel that anyone who wants to know what it was like to experience the fatuously titled “War to End All Wars” in all its chaos, waste and madness should consult not the innumerable memorials that grateful but guilty nations erected, nor even the memoirs and histories that have poured out over the years, but the masterful novels and poetry inspired by the conflict.
You might say that the depth of the wound to civilization at that time might best be measured by the magnificence of this creative outpouring: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and the poetry of Rupert Brooke, Edmund Blunden, Alan Seeger, Edward Thomas, and especially Siegfried Sassoon and Owen.
A late but significant addition to this literature is Pat Barker’s “Regeneration” trilogy, which includes the searing, historically accurate novels Regeneration, An Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road. Two of the characters in this trilogy—which contains undercurrents of politics, class, and sexual orientation beneath the more elemental issues of life and death—are Owen and his mentor Sassoon, who became friends at Craiglockhart War Hospital outside Edinburgh.
Sasson’s status as a war hero saved him from a court martial after his denunciation of the war – and flat-out refusal to return to it--was read in the most public of places: the House of Commons. Fellow poet Robert Graves convinced the powers that be that Sassoon wasn’t being disloyal—the poor fellow was simply shell-shocked, a condition that could be treated at Craiglockhart.
Owen ended up in the same place after four months of active service in 1917 that read like a concise but powerful summary of the dangers the normal soldier faced on a daily basis on the Western front: experiencing gas attacks, nearly contracting frost bite, and suffering a concussion.
The creative flowering that ensued during his recuperation at Craiglockhart lasted only 13 months, but they were enough to assure him a secure place in the 20th-century literary pantheon. Sassoon shepherded these poems about the “Pity of War” into print in 1920, and a later, fuller edition of Owen’s work, along with a memoir of him by Blunden, followed 11 years later.
Another major character in the “Regeneration” trilogy is Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, the anthropologist-neurologist-psychiatrist who treated Sassoon. In WWII, American psychiatrists would benefit from his insight that even the bravest of soldiers could break under the stress of the trauma of war.
Over the years, I’ve come to feel that anyone who wants to know what it was like to experience the fatuously titled “War to End All Wars” in all its chaos, waste and madness should consult not the innumerable memorials that grateful but guilty nations erected, nor even the memoirs and histories that have poured out over the years, but the masterful novels and poetry inspired by the conflict.
You might say that the depth of the wound to civilization at that time might best be measured by the magnificence of this creative outpouring: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and the poetry of Rupert Brooke, Edmund Blunden, Alan Seeger, Edward Thomas, and especially Siegfried Sassoon and Owen.
A late but significant addition to this literature is Pat Barker’s “Regeneration” trilogy, which includes the searing, historically accurate novels Regeneration, An Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road. Two of the characters in this trilogy—which contains undercurrents of politics, class, and sexual orientation beneath the more elemental issues of life and death—are Owen and his mentor Sassoon, who became friends at Craiglockhart War Hospital outside Edinburgh.
Sasson’s status as a war hero saved him from a court martial after his denunciation of the war – and flat-out refusal to return to it--was read in the most public of places: the House of Commons. Fellow poet Robert Graves convinced the powers that be that Sassoon wasn’t being disloyal—the poor fellow was simply shell-shocked, a condition that could be treated at Craiglockhart.
Owen ended up in the same place after four months of active service in 1917 that read like a concise but powerful summary of the dangers the normal soldier faced on a daily basis on the Western front: experiencing gas attacks, nearly contracting frost bite, and suffering a concussion.
The creative flowering that ensued during his recuperation at Craiglockhart lasted only 13 months, but they were enough to assure him a secure place in the 20th-century literary pantheon. Sassoon shepherded these poems about the “Pity of War” into print in 1920, and a later, fuller edition of Owen’s work, along with a memoir of him by Blunden, followed 11 years later.
Another major character in the “Regeneration” trilogy is Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, the anthropologist-neurologist-psychiatrist who treated Sassoon. In WWII, American psychiatrists would benefit from his insight that even the bravest of soldiers could break under the stress of the trauma of war.
The ultimate paradox of Owen’s short but stellar career is the beauty he created from experiences unrivaled in ugliness. See, for instance, his poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” (the title is a savagely ironic allusion to the Roman poet Horace’s contention that it is “sweet and right to die for one’s country”). His evocation of the death of a gas victim is simultaneously excruciating, bitingly satirical, and profoundly moving:
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
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