And
gave us hell, for shell on frantic shell
Hammered
on top, but never quite burst through.
Rain,
guttering down in waterfalls of slime
Kept
slush waist high, that rising hour by hour,
Choked
up the steps too thick with clay to climb.
What
murk of air remained stank old, and sour
With
fumes of whizz-bangs, and the smell of men
Who'd
lived there years, and left their curse in the den,
If
not their corpses. . . .”—Wilfred Owen, “The Sentry”
This
poem, and a number of others of the same era, were brought to my attention in
the cover story of the July issue of Military
History Magazine, “The Poets of Hell,” about the extraordinary literary
outpouring produced by World War I. All of the poets discussed here—not just
Owen, but also Rupert Brooke, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried
Sassoon—were British, but U.S. servicemen would experience their own horrors
once they were shipped overseas. (U.S. soldiers would also contribute significantly to the annals of literature created by the war, notably E.E. Cummings' The Enormous Room and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.)
Every
war breeds its own kind of hell. Those of us who benefit from the sacrifice of
the service personnel in these conflicts stand across a great gulf from them, separated
by this simple fact: we simply have no
clue of the horrors they endured.
No comments:
Post a Comment