WORLD WAR I POETRY
Summary of Events
• The Start of the War
World War I began on July 28, 1914, when Austria
Hungary declared war on Serbia. This seemingly small
conflict between two countries spread rapidly: soon,
Germany, Russia, Great Britain, and France were all
drawn into the war, largely
because they were involved
in treaties that obligated them
to defend certain other nations.
Western and eastern fronts
quickly opened along the borders
of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
The Western and Eastern Fronts
The first month of combat consisted of bold attacks
and rapid troop movements on both fronts. In the
west, Germany attacked first Belgium and then
France. In the east, Russia attacked both Germany
and Austria-Hungary. In the south, Austria-Hungary
attacked Serbia. Following the Battle of the Marne
(September 5–9, 1914), the
western front became
entrenched in central France
and remained that way for the
rest of the war. The fronts in
the east also gradually locked
into place.
Trench Warfare
The middle part of the war,
1916 and 1917, was
dominated by continued
trench warfare in both the east and the west.
Soldiers fought from dug-in positions, striking
at each other with machine guns, heavy
artillery, and chemical weapons. Though
soldiers died by the millions in brutal
conditions, neither side had any substantive
success or gained any advantage.
The United States’ Entrance and
Russia’s Exit
Despite the stalemate on both fronts in
Europe, two important developments in
the war occurred in 1917. In early April,
the United States, angered by attacks
upon its ships in the Atlantic, declared war
on Germany. Then, in November,
the Bolshevik Revolution prompted
Russia to pull out of the war.
The End of the War and
Armistice
Although both sides launched renewed offensives in
1918 in an all-or-nothing effort to win the war, both
efforts failed. The fighting between exhausted,
demoralized troops continued to plod along until the
Germans lost a number of individual battles and very
gradually began to fall back. A deadly outbreak of
influenza, meanwhile, took heavy tolls on soldiers of both
sides. Eventually, the governments of
both Germany and Austria-Hungary
began to lose control as both countries
experienced multiple mutinies from
within their military structures.
The war ended in the late fall of 1918, after the
member countries of the Central Powers signed
armistice agreements one by one. Germany was
the last, signing its armistice on November 11,
1918. As a result of these agreements, AustriaHungary was broken up into several smaller
countries. Germany, under the Treaty
of Versailles, was severely punished
with hefty economic reparations,
territorial losses, and strict limits on
its rights to develop militarily.
• www.sparknotes.com
Significance of WW1
The First World War runs through the British modern-day psyche
like no other conflict. On Remembrance Day Sunday thoughts (of
those who have not fought) turn to the fields in Flanders and the
slaughter of the Somme and Passchendaele more readily than
Dunkirk, El Alamein, or Arnhem (unless, of course, the date is an
anniversary of a specific battle).
It has been described as Britain's 'Vietnam', where the true horror of
War touched everyone and everything in the country, breaking
through the class barrier and irreversibly altering the social structure
of the nation. It also closely parallels Vietnam as it represents an
overwhelming feeling of futility, in that so many lives were wasted for
such little gain. Unlike the Second World War, which more easily
falls into the 'just war' definition of right versus wrong, the First World
War appears as a conflict with aims that were quickly lost,
degenerating to a war of attrition in unbelievable conditions.
Martin Stephen in The Price of Pity (1996) summarises
the horror of the conflict as follows:
"The European powers were mighty in their strength and
wealth. They were neither wholly good nor wholly bad,
and were brought to near- destruction by powers of
ambition, greed and aggression that had always been
there but which had never before led to destruction on
such a scale. The war evoked pity and terror like no
other, and when peace was declared there was an
almost animal venting of emotion in the streets of Britain.
It unleashed untold suffering on Europe, a suffering that
went out of the control of any human agency and which
toppled some monarchies and shook other
nations to their roots. And of course, when it was
all over, the world had been made safe, and the
war to end all wars had been fought." (p. 236)
Moreover, the War was dehumanising. It brought home
how quickly and easily mankind could be reduced to a
state lower than animals. Pat Barker, in her novel
Regeneration (1992), reflects on the War's terrible
reversal of expectations:
"The Great Adventure. They'd been mobilized into holes
in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And
the Great Adventure (the real life equivalent of all the
adventure stories they'd devoured as boys) consisted of
crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed.
The war that had promised so much in the
way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered
'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their
mothers and sisters had scarcely known."
The First World War provides one of the seminal
moments of the twentieth-century in which literate
soldiers, plunged into inhuman conditions, reacted to
their surroundings in poems reflecting Wordsworth's
'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'.
Stephen (1996) states that 'no school of
verse has ever been linked more clearly
to a historical event' and that 'Society's
vision of this historical event...was ironically
determined by a literary response to it, and
it is the vision of some of the war's poets
that has dominated the popular image of
what that war was to those who fought in it
and lived through it.'.
Rupert Brooke
Brooke's entire reputation as a war poet
rests on only 5 "war sonnets". Brooke's war
experience consisted of one day of limited
military action with the Hood Battalion
during the evacuation of Antwerp.
Consequently, his "war sonnets" swell with
naive sentiments of the most general kind
on the themes of maturity, purpose and
romantic death – the kind of sentiments held
by many (but not all) young Englishmen at
the outbreak of the war. Brooke's "war
sonnets" are really more a declaration
occasioned by the ups and downs of his
tumultuous personal life than a call to war
for his generation.
Brooke's poetry gives us a glimpse of a
golden era in England just before the First
World War. To be more precise, it was a
golden time only for the upper classes, who
enjoyed the fruits of Britain's imperial
dominance: public school education,
guaranteed employment (if they desired it)
and access to the rich and powerful
members of society. The gap between rich
and poor was wide during this period, and
unrest was beginning to grow among the
lower classes. With hindsight it seems
obvious that this state of affairs could not
last forever. The war gave a huge shock to
the system and, despite the terrible human
cost, led eventually to a more equal society,
not least because the poorer classes were
largely the ones dying in the trenches as a
result of orders issued by untrained,
aristocratic generals living miles behind the
lines. Brooke's generation was the last to
enjoy such an unchallenged position of
privilege.
His early poetry was classically inspired, with death as its most frequent theme
throughout. Later, he wrote more from his personal experience gained in the South
Seas and later in his brief military career. The shortness of his life added to his
reputation, especially at a time when so many young men were being killed. Amongst
his works were five War Sonnets, a sixth sonnet – The Treasure – and The Old
Vicarage, Grantchester. Winston Churchill wrote his obituary in The Times of April 26,
1915, saying
"he advanced to the brink ... with absolute conviction of the rightness of his
country's cause".
Brooke's friends complained that the heroic myth of Brooke's patriotic self-sacrifice
was deliberately exaggerated to encourage more young men to enlist. Since Brooke's
death, the name Rupert has been used as a term of mockery for any young Army
officer with a public school education. Generations of school children would be taught
the opening patriotic lines from ‘The Soldier’:
"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England."
The patriotic poems of Brooke are often compared to the anti-war
poems of Siegfried Sassoon who, ironically, spent the majority of
the war in active service, yet survived.
Peace
Now; God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye , and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour cold not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
Oh! We, who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.
Rupert Brooke
The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Rupert Brooke
Siegfried Sassoon
•
Siegfried Sassoon was born in England, in 1886. Sassoon
was educated at Marlborough and Cambridge where he
studied both Law and History before leaving without taking
a degree. After Cambridge, Sassoon lived the life of a
sportsman, hunting, riding point-to-point races and playing cricket until the
outbreak of the War. Although Sassoon wrote poetry before the War he was
no more than a minor Georgian poet.
•
Sassoon enlisted on 2 August 1914, two days before the British declaration
of war, and initially joined as a trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry – later
Sassoon was commissioned in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers (May 1915).
Between November 1915 and April 1917 he served as a second lieutenant
in both the First and Second Battalions R.W.F.
•
On November 1, 1915 Sassoon suffered his first personal loss of the War.
His younger brother Hamo was buried at sea after being mortally wounded
at Gallipoli. Sassoon subsequently commemorated this with a poem entitled
To My Brother. Then on March 18, 1916 second lieutenant David C.
'Tommy' Thomas was killed whilst out with a wiring party.
• These losses upset Sassoon and he became determined to "get his
revenge" on the Germans. To this end, he went out on patrol in noman's-land even when there were no raids planned. Such reckless
enthusiasm earned him the nickname "Mad Jack", but he was saved
from further folly by a four-week spell at the Army School in
Flixecourt. Returning to the front a month later some of Sassoon's
desire for revenge had abated, and when his platoon was involved
in a raid on Kiel Trench shortly afterwards, his actions in getting his
dead and wounded men back to the British trenches earned him a
Military Cross, which he received the day before the start of the
Battle of the Somme, in July 1916.
• He was not involved in the Battle of the Somme and was
sent home from France in late July after an attack of
trench fever (or enteritis). From Oxford's Somerville
College, Sassoon was sent home to Weirleigh for
convalescence. He reported to the Regimental Depot
in Liverpool in December 1916, and returned to France
in February 1917.
•
Sassoon was only back in France for two days before going down with German
measles, which forced him to spend nearly ten days at the 25th Stationary Hospital in
Rouen. On March 11 Sassoon rejoined the 2nd Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers on
the Somme front. He was "in reserve" during the Battle of Arras before spending a
month in the Hindenburg Tunnel.
•
Sassoon participated in the second Battle of the Scarpe where he was wounded in
the shoulder. This particular incident started a train of events which culminated in
Sassoon's Declaration, for it was whilst on convalescent leave after being wounded
that Sassoon talked to several prominent pacifists (including John Middleton Murry
and Bertrand Russell). His Declaration of "wilful defiance" was written during this
time, and he returned to the Depot in Liverpool having sent his statement to his
Colonel, miserably determined to take whatever punishment was meted out.
•
Fortunately for Sassoon, his friend and fellow
Welch Fusilier, Robert Graves, intervened,
pulled strings with the authorities and managed
to persuade them to have Sassoon medically
boarded (or referred), with the result that in
July 1917 he was sent to Craiglockhart War
Hospital, Edinburgh officially suffering from
shell-shock.
• It was at Craiglockhart that Sassoon met the poet Wilfred Owen
(also diagnosed with shell-shock). Sassoon's encouragement of
Owen's writing has been well-documented.
• Sassoon himself wrote a good deal of poetry whilst at Craiglockhart
and the material he wrote at that time later appeared in CounterAttack and Other Poems. After four months at Craiglockhart,
Sassoon was again passed fit for General Service abroad.
• He had spent many hours talking to his psychiatrist,
Dr. W.H.R. Rivers and eventually realised that his
protest had achieved nothing, except to keep him
away from his men; his decision to apply for
General Service seems to have been based on his
perceived responsibilities at the front.
• Sassoon eventually found himself in the Front Line again, near
Mercatel. From there he moved to St. Hilaire and the Front Line at
St. Floris where his old foolhardiness took over, despite the
responsibility of being a Company Commander. Sassoon decided to
attack the German trenches opposite them, and he went out with a
young Corporal. His actions were paid for with a wound to his head
on July 13, 1918, and Sassoon was invalided back to England. That
was the end of Sassoon's War.
• After a period of convalescence
he was placed on indefinite sick
leave until after the Armistice,
eventually retiring officially from
the Army in March 1919.
• Much of Sassoon's poetry written
during the War was epigrammatic
and satirical in nature. Several
poems, particularly those in
Counter-Attack and Other Poems
are aimed at those on the Home
Front. Sassoon used his poems to
hit out at those at Home whom he
considered to be making a profit out
of the War, or those whom he felt
were helping to prolong the War.
• Only a few of his poems were
actually about the generals and
other senior officers - the two bestknown of these being Base Details
and The General.
The General
“Good-morning; good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
*****
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
Siegfried Sassoon
Does it Matter?
Does it matter? – losing your legs?...
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
Does it matter ? – losing your sight?...
There's such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.
Do they matter? – those dreams from the pit?...
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won't say that you're mad;
For they'll know you've fought for your country
And no one will worry a bit.
Siegfried Sassoon
Wilfred Owen
• In 1914 the First World War broke out on a largely
innocent world, a world that still associated warfare
with glorious cavalry charges and the noble pursuit
of heroic ideals. This was the world's first experience
of modern mechanised warfare. As the months and
years passed, each bringing increasing slaughter and misery, the
soldiers became increasingly disillusioned. Many of the strongest
protests made against the war were made through the medium of
poetry by young men horrified by what they saw. One of these poets
was Wilfred Owen.
• Wilfred Owen was 21 when the war broke out. Although he had
failed to win a scholarship to university, he was very intelligent and
cultured, and in the two years before the war began, had taken a
post at the Berlitz School in Bordeaux, France, tutoring the children
of wealthy families and learning the language and literature of the
country.
• Owen was not horrified or elated by the outbreak of war, although
during 1914, he became more aware of the human sacrifice involved
and was filled with confusion. Eventually he returned to England and
on 21 October 1915, enlisted in the Artists' Rifles. He spent the next
seven and a half months training in Essex and on the 4 June was
commissioned into the Manchester Regiment, where he underwent
further training before crossing to France on 29 December.
• In the second week of January,
one of the worst in memory, he
led his platoon into the Battle of
the Somme. he wrote to his
mother every week and described
what he had been through: "Those
fifty hours were the agony of my
happy life... I nearly broke down
and let myself drown in the water
that was now rising slowly above
my knees. In the Platoon on my left,
the sentries over the dug-out were
blown to nothing".
• In the middle of March, Owen fell through a shell-hole into a cellar
and was trapped in the dark for three days, suffering from nausea
and concussion. He spent a fortnight in hospital before rejoining his
battalion and becoming involved in fierce fighting. At one stage he
was blown out of the trench in which he was taking cover from an
artillery bombardment which had already dismembered an officer in
the neighbouring trench.
• He escaped uninjured, but these trials by fire had taken their toll on
his mind, and on May 1st, he was seen by his Commanding Officer
to be behaving strangely. He was ordered to
report to the Battalion Medical Officer who
found him to be shaky and with a confused
memory. He was eventually diagnosed as
having neurasthenia (shell shock) and was
invalided back to England and then to
Craiglockhart War hospital near Edinburgh.
• Apart from his joining the army, no other event had so much
influence over Owen as meeting Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart.
Owen read the published poetry of Sassoon for the first time at the
hospital. He introduced himself, and so began a close friendship and
literary partnership which would create some of the finest poetry of
the war. Owen's most famous poems were written from this time
until he left the hospital.
• Owen relived his most traumatic memories every night through the
form of obsessive nightmares. Under Sassoon's direction, he began
to write about these memories in poetry. His poems recreated the
miserable conditions and constant
stress with which the soldiers lived –
the mud, rats, barbed wire, lice, fleas,
corpses, blood and constant shelling.
He also gave graphic descriptions of
the effects of poison gas.
• In one of his most famous poems
Anthem for Doomed Youth, he asked
angrily "what passing-bells for these
who die as cattle?", reflecting the fact
that the soldiers were simply little
more than machine gun fodder, lines
of them killed instantly as they went
over the top.
• Owen wrote for an entire generation
of young men killed or horribly
wounded in a four year war. In one
poem Disabled, he wrote about the
thousands of young men who
dreamed of glory and triumph and
joined the army with all the others in
the factory, or on their street, or at a
football match, where recruiting
drives were often made.
• Owen is the most famous of all the
war poets as he succeeded in
portraying the reality of the war the boredom, the helplessness, the
horror and above all, the futility of it
- without losing his artistic poise, or
allowing bitterness to creep into
his work.
• Wilfred Owen returned to the front
in 1918 and was awarded the
military cross for bravery for
capturing a German machine gun.
He never received it as he was
killed early on the morning of 4th
November 1918, seven days
before the armistice.
Anthem For Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Wilfred Owen
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
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.
Wilfred Owen