How Was the War Represented?

World War 1 paper 9 How was the war represented? How did the veterans tell the war? The war poets The war poetry of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney among others, marks a transition in English cultural history. These were all young men who, pushed to the limits of experience, found in poetry a means of expressing extreme emotions of fear, anger and love. Their combined voice is more than a personal witness to military events in France from 1914 to 1918. The poems they wrote have become part of the national consciousness, and conscience. They themselves have become icons of innocence, vulnerability, courage and integrity, in a world which after the war felt that these values were increasingly under threat. Owen wrote that: ‘All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poet must be truthful’. Many of their best poems are driven by a need to communicate the reality of the evils of war, particularly to those back home. At the start of the conflict, poets like Rupert Brooke buoyed the popular enthusiasm for war with rhetoricised feelings of idealism and patriotism. CH Sorley and Robert Graves were among the first to attempt to write in a way which challenged the prevailing spirit by trying to capture the awful reality of the experience. Sassoon, a fellow officer in Graves’s regiment and his closest friend during the war, was at first shocked by Graves’s early realism and thought his poems ‘violent and repulsive’ in both their use of language and their presentation of trench life. Sassoon was, in the early stages, writing in a stylised, artificial way about the war, but later changed his views and went on to write blunt, satirical and angry protests about the violence and stupidity he witnessed. Both Graves and Sassoon influenced Wilfred Owen, whom they met at Craiglockhart Military Hospital. All three suffered from neurasthenia, or shell shock. Owen and Rosenberg wrote the most enduring and compassionate poetry of the war, which transcends their immediate environment. They both died in action in France. Wilfred Owen – Dulce et decorum Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, In all my dreams before my helpless sight Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots If in some smothering dreams you too could But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all pace blind; Behind the wagon that we flung him in, Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin, If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, fumbling Bitter as the cud Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— But someone still was yelling out and stumbling My friend, you would not tell with such high zest And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.— To children ardent for some desperate glory, Dim, through the misty panes and thick green The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est light, Pro patria mori. Adapted from websites http://www.warpoets.org - http://www.enotes.com - http://www.iwm.org.uk World War 1 paper 9 Analysis Wilfred Owen had considerable first-hand experience of the horrors of gas warfare during World War I, and his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” is an attempt to depict the helplessness of men caught in a gas attack. Writing in four irregular verse paragraphs, Owen describes the general condition of men involved in the war, sketches briefly the shock of a gas attack, then dwells on the aftermath of this tragic event on someone who lives through it. Although it is often unwise to associate the narrator of a poem with its author, it is quite likely that in “Dulce et Decorum Est” Owen is speaking in his own voice. His method of direct address to the reader makes his appeal in the final lines especially compelling. Owen opens the poem with a description of a group of demoralized soldiers retreating from the front lines of the battlefield. The men are clearly fatigued (“Men marched asleep,” the narrator observes), so worn down that they are “deaf even to the hoots/ Of gas-shells dropping softly behind” (lines 78). Then, suddenly, someone shouts “Gas! GAS!” (line 9), and the men go into an “ecstasy of fumbling” (line 9) to put on masks before the deadly poison can take their lives. All but one are successful; the narrator looks out from behind the glass of his protective mask into the “green sea” (line 14) that the gas has created around him and his comrades, watching helplessly as one of his fellow soldiers dies in agony. The image of that dying soldier is one that can never leave the narrator. As readers learn in the two lines set off from the rest of the text, the sight of that dying comrade haunts the narrator’s dreams, as the soldier “plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (line 16). That memory prompts the narrator to offer in the final verse paragraph some bitter advice to readers about the nature of warfare and the outcome of blind patriotism. In the last twelve lines of the poem, Owen describes his experience of walking behind the wagon in which the dead man has been placed, seeing the corpse frozen in the twisted agony of its death throes. That sight, he says, would prevent any man from adopting glibly the notion that dying for one’s country is somehow noble. Sigfried Sassoon - Suicide in the Trenches I knew a simple soldier boy Who grinned at life in empty joy, Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, And whistled early with the lark. In winter trenches, cowed and glum, With crumps and lice and lack of rum, He put a bullet through his brain. No one spoke of him again. You smug-faced crowds with kindlingeye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you’ll never know The hell where youth and laughter go. Analysis “Suicide in the Trenches,” by the English poet Sigfried Sassoon (1886-1967), is one of the many poems Sassoon composed in response to World War I. It reflects his own notable service in that especially bloody conflict. Sassoon was a brave and gallant upper-class officer who eventually opposed the war, but he never lost his admiration for the common soldiers who had to fight it. Sassoon felt contempt for the political leaders and civilian war hawks who, safe in their power and comfort, sent young men off to die in huge battles that seemed futile and pointless. Line 1 of the poem is as simple in style as it is in subject. There is nothing complex about its diction (word choice) or its syntax (sentence structure). This is true, in fact, of the phrasing of the entire opening stanza, which constitutes one long but very straightforward sentence. The opening stanza could almost be the opening sentence of a story for children: it is cheerful, pleasant, and appealing. For instance, the use of the Adapted from websites http://www.warpoets.org - http://www.enotes.com - http://www.iwm.org.uk World War 1 paper 9 word “boy,” rather than a reference to a “soldier," helps make the youth sound particularly young and vulnerable; he is “simple” in several senses: he is innocent, naïve, and not especially sophisticated or well- educated. His joy is “empty” (2) in the sense that it arises from no particular provocation. Instead, he is by nature happy and optimistic, at peace with himself and at peace with the world. He doesn’t try to hide his feelings: he “grin[s] at life” because he attributes his own good nature to life itself. He sleeps soundly even “through the lonesome dark” (3), untroubled by worries, nightmares, or fears of any kind. In every way, the boy seems at peace with himself and also in tune with nature (4). The shift from stanza one to stanza two would have been totally unexpected—and therefore all the more shocking—were it not for the extremely explicit title of the poem. (One suspects that Wilfred Owen, a more talented war poet than Sassoon, would have given away much less information in the title if he had written on this subject and would have been far more subtle in general.) In any case, the second stanza shifts from the springtime implied in stanza one to a contrasting emphasis on winter (5). The boy who had no cause for fear in the first stanza now seems “cowed,” and while in the first stanza he had “grinned” (2), now he is “glum” (5)—a word that sounds as depressing as its meaning. The word “crumps” (6) not only refers to the sounds of artillery shells falling in soft soil but also sounds like the kind of muffled impacts it describes. The reference to “crumps” thus helps us “hear”... John Singer Sargent - Gassed Analysis image: A side on view of a line of soldiers being led along a duckboard by a medical orderly. Their eyes are bandaged as a result of exposure to gas and each man holds on to the shoulder of the man in front.

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