WW1 Thematic Connections: By you, for you
Nature
A number of authors use nature as an enemy as bad, or even worse than the Germans. Others
present nature as an innocent force corrupted by war. Finally, some poets use nature’s strengths as a
metaphor for soldiers’ attributes.
Nature as an enemy
‘Exposure’ – Owen: ‘As the merciless iced east winds knife us’; ‘Dawn massing in the east her
melancholy army’
‘Colonel Cold’: ‘Snapping pegs of iron’; ‘making those that lie out there cry in pain’
‘Rain’ – Edward Thomas: ‘Rain, midnight rain, nothing buy the wild rain.’
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer – Sassoon
‘Battlefield’ – Aldington: ‘The wind is piercing still.’
‘All the Hills and Vales Along’ – Sorley: ‘Sew your gladness for earth’s reaping’
Nature as an innocent force
‘Range-finding’ – Robert Frost: ‘The battle next a cobweb diamond strung / and cut a flower beside a
ground bird’s nest’; ‘A butterfly its fall had dispossessed’
‘The Cherry Trees’ – Thomas: ‘The cherry trees bend over and are shedding’
Nature as positive
‘The Soldier’ – Brooke: ‘her flowers to love, her ways to roam, washed by the rivers, blest by suns of
home’
‘Returning we hear the larks’ – Rosenberg: ‘Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks.’
‘Into Battle’ – Grenfell: ‘Take warmth and life from the glowing earth’; ‘The woodland trees that
stand together, they stand to him each a friend.’
‘Grass’ – Carl Sandburg: ‘I am the grass, I cover all.’
‘Futility’ – Owen: ‘If anything might raise him now, the kind old sun will know.’
Graphic Realism
Texts dealing with this theme include:
‘A Dead Boche’ – Graves: ‘Big-bellied, spectacled, crop haired, dribbling black blood from nose and
beard’
‘Dulce et Decorum est’ – Owen: ‘Bent double, like beggars under sack, knock kneed and coughing
like hags’; ‘gargling from the froth corrupted lungs’; ‘limped on, blood-shod. All went lame...’
Birdsong – Faulks: ‘So much muscle and blood in the Earth’; ‘The brutal perversion of life that was
lived in the turned soil and torn flesh of war [...] unconquerable existence.’
Regeneration – Barker: ‘the pavement was covered in corpses. Old ones, new ones, black, green...’
All Quiet on the Western Front – Remarque: ‘We see men without mouths, without faces’
‘Dead Man’s Dump’ – Rosenberg: ‘A man’s brains splattered on a stretcher-bearer’s face’
‘Glory of Women’ – Sassoon: ‘Trampling the terrible corpses – Blind with blood’; ‘His face is trodden
deeper into the mud’
‘They’ – Sassoon: ‘For George lost both his legs’; ‘Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die’; ‘Bert’s
gone syphilitic’
Blackadder goes Forth: ‘General Melchett is about to offer me an attractive new opportunity to have
my brains blown out for Britain.’
The Ghost Road – Barker: ‘Damaged brains and drooping mouths’
‘The Conscript’ – Wilfred Gibson: ‘Mangled limbs, blind eyes’
‘In Memoriam’ – E A Mackintosh: ‘writhing bodies’
Dehumanisation
This is important in poetry and war texts because it shows how soldiers get wiped out in waves. For
example Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ expresses the notion of men who go to war dying ‘like
cattle’. Soldiers are compared to animals for the slaughter, to represent how expendable they were in
the eyes of generals.
It also shows the realities of the horrors of the War. Many poets and authors use descriptive
language to show the graphic brutality of conflict. Owen’s poetry describes gassed men, Sassoon’s
‘They’ explores the injuries sustained by soldiers at the front and Barbusse, in Le Feu, lays before us
‘frightful heaps of wounded and slain’ who are ‘eviscerated like human beings’.
Texts dealing with this theme include:
Death of a Hero – Aldington: ‘how atone from those lakes and seas of blood’
Oh What a Lovely War: the War Game
Realities of War – Gibbs: generals acting as though war were all a big game
Letters of Wilfred Owen: ‘I looked back and saw the ground all crawling and wormy with wounded
bodies’
Le Feu – Barbusse: ‘the skin rusty or yellow’; ‘faces are as black as tar’
Essays of Edward Garner: ‘armies to wade deeper and deeper into the morass of European
slaughter’
All Quiet on the Western Front – Remarque: wave after wave of German soldiers are sent to the
front
Idealism
The theme is relevant and important as idealism made up a key part of early war poetry. It is the
opposite of the subsequent graphic realism which was to stem from it and contrasts greatly with the
latter. Idealism represents hope and positivism; it leads to propaganda and high morale. Graphic
realism, on the other hand, illustrates despair and negativity; all that is ‘bad’ and that which accuses
idealism, or the propaganda created from it, of being ‘cant’.
Texts dealing with this theme include:
Ford Maddox Ford’s early letters
‘Who’s for the Game? – Jessie Pope
‘In Flander’s Fields’ – MacCrae
Strange Meeting – Hill
Not About Heroes – MacDonald
Regeneration – Barker
‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ – Owen
The Gap between the Front Line and Home
The war changes soldiers: they become different creatures away from home. This has an impact on
the way civilians perceive them – and vice versa.
Texts dealing with this theme include:
Realities of War – Gibbs
‘Recalling War’ – Graves
Return of the Soldier – West
‘MCMIX’ – Larkin
Regeneration – Barker
‘The Volunteer’ – Asquith
All Quiet on the Western Front – Remarque
‘An Irish Airman forsees his Death’ – Yeats
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer – Sassoon
Ford Maddox Ford’s letters
Oh What a Lovely War
The Marsden Case – Ford
‘The General – Sassoon
‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ – Owen
‘Men Who March Away’ – Hardy
‘Exposure’ – Owen
‘Glory of Women’ – Sassoon
Not About Heroes – MacDonald
‘Insensibility’ – Owen