MITHYL BANYMANDHUB
My generation may not have first-hand experiences about World War I and World War II. Even then we have read or seen on television the outcome of hostility between neighbouring countries. As an adolescent I was particularly interested in the War America fought in Vietnam. It was the time when so many events were taking place around the world. It was in turmoil.
Many books and films have the war as backdrop. The novels have been adapted for the screen. The list is endless but among the movies which emerge from the recesses of my subconscious are, of course The Longest Day followed by Hell in the Pacific, Tora, Tora, Tora, The Bridge on the River Kwai which was being screened here during the visit of the late H.R.H Princess Margaret, The Guns of Navarone, Schindler’s list and Platoon.
Opinions are divided about the necessity of warfare. There are people whose conscience or religious belief prevents them from fighting. I am here reminded of Tu ne tueras point, a film in which a young man is judged because he refuses to join the army. 
As a budding adolescent who was studying the Classics I came across the Roman saying Si Vis pacem para bellum. Translated into English it reads, If you want peace prepare for war.
War and Peace
In one of her speeches H.R.H. Queen Elizabeth II stated, It has always been easier to hate and destroy. To build and to cherish is much more difficult.
The threat of Warfare is always lurking somewhere. It can be compared to the sword of Damocles for one never knows when a crisis will escalate into warfare. There are people who believe that a war yields neither a winner nor a loser. Both parties have to face its grim reality which comprises losses in terms of manpower and infrastructure besides the many inconveniences it causes to innocent civilians. Thus, in some quarters war has been criticized in no uncertain terms in chronicles, novels and poems. Among those who have done so is a young English poet who considered war as a waste of resources when he wrote about the horror and pity of World War I. His poetry challenged the conventional view of war as a romantic adventure.
Interest in Art and Nature
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen uttered his first cries in Oswestry, England on March 18, 1893, the son of Thomas and Susan Owen. A man who loved sports and male companionship, Thomas often had trouble to understand his son’s introspective nature and his love of books. Owen was much closer to his mother who seemed to approve and encourage his interest in art and nature.
When Owen was ten, his mother took him on a holiday excursion to Brixton by the Hill, a nature trip that he would later describe as his birth as a poet. Although Owen’s experiences in World War I would cause him to lose faith in his mother’s more orthodox Christianity, he still retained his love for her, writing in a letter that it was his mother and not his motherland that provided him the strength to carry on during the heavy fighting. 
At eighteen Owen found that he lacked the money to attend the University of London. His mother who wanted him to become a Cleric urged him to discover whether he might have a religious calling. Consequently, Owen went to work as an unpaid assistant to a vicar in Dunsden, Oxfordshire. There, he helped with the care of the poor and the sick in the parish, further developing the sympathetic nature that would appear so strongly in his later poetry. It was also as a parish worker that Owen began to believe that the efforts of the Church of England to meet the needs of the poor were inadequate. After leaving the parish and spending two years in France teaching languages, Owen returned to England in 1915. Believing that it was his duty to fight as his country was engaged in the war, Owen enlisted. The next time Owen journeyed to France, in January 1917, he was a commissioned officer to the Western Front in order to serve his country in World War I.
Sublimity of the Sound of Guns
Like many young men of his generation, Owen went to war imagining that it would be a glorious adventure. His first letters from the front praised his company’s “fine heroic spirit” and romanticized the sound of its guns on having “a certain sublimity”.
Yet only two days later, after Owen had actually seen combat, the tone of his letters changed. He no more believed that war was a heroic adventure. He described the blasted battlefield as an “inferno” of “mud and thunder”. He admitted that his earlier views of heroism and glory were grossly mistaken. On March, 1917, Owen was hospitalized for a brain concussion caused by an accidental fall into a fifteen-foot deep shell hole. He seemed to recover but he suffered from severe headaches which were later diagnosed as symptoms of shell shock.
Horrors of the Battle
After being moved several times, Owen was finally admitted to the Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was there that in August, 1917, he met Siegfried Sassoon, an army captain and poet who encouraged him to write war poetry. He accordingly started writing poetry that revealed the true horrors of battle. Most of Owen’s best poems were written from August, 1917, to September, 1918. This brief period of productivity which started by his meeting with Sassoon ended prematurely with his death. When he was twenty-five years old, Owen was trying to get his company across the Sambre Canal, north of Ors, France when he was killed by machine-gun fire on November 4, 1918, one week before the armistice.
Most of his poems were published posthumously. His friend and fellow soldier-poet, Sassoon, collected and published twenty-three Poems by Wilfred Owen.
Prior to his death, Owen wrote a brief preface for the volume of poems he had hoped to see published while he was still alive. In the preface he clearly mentions, “This book is not about heroes” and he added that “it is not concerned with poetry”. Owen wanted to shock readers by the violent and bloody futility of war, but he also wanted them to feel sympathy for all the dead and dying. As he put it, “My subject is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity”. If people could be brought to feel sympathy for the loss of life on both sides of the conflict, maybe they would be less eager to continue the deadly fighting or to start another war once this was over. He wanted his gruesome-but-true depictions of death in battle to stand as a warning to his generation that war must be stopped.
From Shock to Pity
A poem such as Anthem for Doomed Youth shows both sides of Owen the poet – his intent to give shocks as warnings, and his desire to evoke the reader’s sympathy for suffering. The poem begins as if it were going to be a traditional Christian elegy mourning the dead, but then it shifts abruptly to emphasize the un-Christian brutality of a soldier’s death in battle: “What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?” The last six lines of the sonnet proceeds to change the mood from shock to pity as the poem shifts his emphasis from the brutality of death in battle to the sadness of those at home who mourn for their dead brothers, sons and would-be bridegrooms. Owen often introduces another dimension in his poetry – a deep sympathy for the suffering. He still tried to save some room for tenderness and compassion, as if looking forward to the world of brotherhood that might be created if all wars were to cease.
In his poem Dulce et Decorum Est, Owen mocked the deadly sentiment expressed by the Latin poet, Horace, that It is sweet and fitting to die for the fatherland, exposing the belief as a lie. Yet in other poems such as strange meeting, probably his most celebrated poem, he soothes the living and the dead with words of sympathy. In Disabled, a distressed war veteran who has lost both legs and an arm, recalls a time when he thought that war would be glorious. By means of this poem Owen warns future generations that war is not fun. It is a game in which what is lost can never be retrieved.
The British poet Cecil Day Lewis believed that Wilfred Owen’s poems were “certainly the finest written by any English Poet of the First War”. Owen’s warning remains as valid today as it was when he wrote it. He depicted the horrors of war with sometimes shocking realism. The pity he felt for people who knew no better than to kill one another comes through strongly in his poems. What also comes through is the fact that he wrote such passionate antiwar poetry is his hope that the war – all wars – will end soon.
Bibliography
- White, Gertrude M. Wilfred Owen. New York: Twayne, 1969
- Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
- Hibberd, Dominic. Owen the poet. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986
- Owen, Wilfred. Wilfred Owen: Collected letters. Edited by Harold Owen and John Bell. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.