by Geoff Dyer
Owen’s famous preface insists that his ‘subject is War, and the pity of War’ (rather than honour or glory), but his subject might also be termed Memory, and the projection of Memory. His poetry redefines rather than simply undermines Binyon’s words (‘We will remember them’) which also work by projected retrospect. Despite their apparent inappropriateness Owen’s poems are now invisibly appended, like exquisitely engraved graffiti, to memorial inscriptions in honour of ‘The Glorious Dead’.
In Wanlockhead in north Dumfriesshire, the village memorial takes the form of a mourning soldier atop a marble plinth. Beneath the statue’s feet is written ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori’, a phrase whose meaning has been wrenched by Owen’s poem irrevocably away from the simplicity of the intended sentiment. The old lie has acquired a new ironic truth. By the time Sassoon concludes his 1933 poem ‘An Unveiling’, a mock-oration for London’s ‘War-gassed victims’, the Latin has been so Owenized as to render further satirical twisting superfluous.
Our bequest
Is to rebuild, for What-they-died-for’s sake,
A bomb-proof roofed Metropolis, and to make
Gas-drill compulsory. Dulce et Decorum est . . .
R. H. Mottram hoped the Spanish Farm Trilogy might be seen as ‘a real Cenotaph, a true War memorial’; Richard Aldington wanted Death of a Hero to stand as ‘a memorial in its ineffective way to a generation’ – but it was only Owen who succeeded, as Sassoon, Blunden, Graves and the rest could not, in memorializing the war in the image of his work. The perfect war memorial – the one which best expresses our enduring memory of the war – would show men bent double, knock-kneed, marching asleep, limping, blind, blood-shod. Either that or – and it amounts to the same thing – it should be a statue of Owen himself.
Owen addressed the issue of his own legacy in ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, a poem which anticipates the time when it will stand as the response to its own appeal: ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ Sassoon made a vital contribution here, substituting ‘Doomed’ for ‘Dead’ in an earlier draft so that his friend’s poem, like Binyon’s, is about those who are going to have died. Blunden wrote a poem entitled ‘1916 seen from 1921’ – Owen had written a dozen poems like that four years earlier.
The final line of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ refers to the custom of drawing down household blinds as a sign of mourning – of displaying loss – but it is also a disquieting image of concealment, of the larger process whereby the state and the military hid their culpability from scrutiny. These blinds stayed firmly down until Cabinet papers and War Office records became available to researchers in the sixties. Only in the last couple of years, however, have we learnt how Haig, for example, in another telling instance of the way the war seems to have been fought retrospectively, systematically rewrote his diary to make his intentions accord with – and minimize his responsibility for – what actually resulted from his command. Denis Winter, whose controversial endeavours have cast damaging light on the way the state colluded in perpetuating Haig’s preferred version of events, concludes that ‘the official record of the war – political as well as military – [was] systematically distorted both during the war as propaganda and after it, in the official history’. The amount of material he has unearthed in Canadian and Australian archives also emphasizes how effectively documents passed on to the Public Record Office in Britain had been ‘vetted so as to remove those which contradicted the official line’. Even when the blinds are raised, the sudden rush of light reveals how much is – and will remain – concealed, missing.
Winter’s obsessive scrutiny of the Haig records and their incriminating gaps has destroyed the last shreds of Haig’s reputation; with Owen a similar process has been under way in the opposite direction. His manuscripts have been scrutinized by Jon Stallworthy so that almost every variant of every line is now available. The work of no British poet of this century has been more thoroughly posthumously edited and preserved or, despite Yeats famously excluding him from the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (on the grounds that ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’), more widely anthologized. In the twenties Haig’s reputation was embalmed in an official vacuum of secrecy; likewise, nothing was known of Owen’s life or his development as a poet. In his 1920 edition of Owen’s poems Sassoon declared that aside from the poems any ‘records of [Owen’s] conversation, behaviour or appearance, would be irrelevant and unseemly’. Until Blunden’s edition – which included a memoir and what have since become well-known extracts from the letters – he seemed, in Philip Larkin’s phrase, ‘almost a spirit called into being by the Great War’s unprecedented beastliness to assert compassion and humanity’. His poems ‘existed for some ten years in a vacuum, as if they were utterances of The Spirit of the Pities in some updated The Dynasts’.8
In the early twenties everything about the war – except the scale of loss – was suspended in a vacuum which all the memorials and rites of Remembrance were in the process of trying, in different ways, to fill. Husbands, sons, fathers were missing. Facts were missing. Everywhere the overwhelming sense was of lack, of absence. Overwhelmingly present was ‘the pall of death which hung so sorrowful, stagnant and static over Britain’.
To a nation stunned by grief the prophetic lag of posthumous publication made it seem that Owen was speaking from the other side of the grave. Memorials were one sign of the shadow cast by the dead over England in the twenties; another was a surge of interest in spiritualism. Owen was the medium through whom the missing spoke.
They are going to have died: this is the tense not only of the poems of Owen (who carried photos of the dead and mutilated in his wallet) but also of photographs from the war. Although he was thinking only of photographs, both are, in Roland Barthes’ phrase, ‘prophecies in reverse’. With this in mind, like Brodsky contemplating photographs of Auden, ‘I began to wonder whether one form of art was capable of depicting another, whether the visual could apprehend the semantic.’
It is difficult, now, to imagine the Great War in colour. Even contemporary poems like Gurney’s ‘Pain’ depict the war in monochrome:
Grey monotony lending
Weight to the grey skies, grey mud where goes
An army of grey bedrenched scarecrows in rows . . .
‘I again work more in black and white than in colour,’ Paul Klee noted on 26 October 1917. ‘Colour seems to be a little exhausted just now.’ Many photographs – like those from the first day of the Somme – were taken under skies of Kodak blue, but, even had it been available, colour film would – it seems to us – have rendered the scenes in sepia. Coagulated by time, even fresh blood seems greyish brown.
Photos like this are not simply true to the past; they are photos of the past. The soldiers marching through them seem to be tramping through ‘the great sunk silences’ of the past. The photos are colour-resistant. They refuse to come out of the past – and the past is sepia-tinted. Peter Porter in his poem ‘Somme and Flanders’ notes how ‘Those Harmsworth books have sepia’d’; Vernon Scannell in ‘The Great War’ refers to the ‘sepia November’ of armistice.
And if, as Gilbert Adair has suggested, Auden’s poems of the thirties are somehow ‘in black and white’, then Owen’s, by extension, are in sepia monochrome. It is impossible to colour them in; like photographs, they too are colour-resistant.
Having seen all things red,
Their eyes are rid
Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.
In Blunden too ‘vermilion’, ‘damask’, the ‘pinks and whites’ of roses and ‘golden lights’ of daisies are out of place:
. . . the choice of colour
Is scarcely right; this red should have been duller.
The world had had the colour bombed out of it. Sepia, the colour of mud, emerged as the dominant tone of the war. Battle rendered the landscape sepia. ‘The year itself looks sepia and soiled,’ writes Timothy Findley of 1915, ‘muddied like its pictures.’
This is why – to return to an earlier theme – the photographs of men queuing up to enlist seem wounded by the experience that is still to come: they are tinted by the trenches, by Flanders mud. The recruits of 1914 have the look of ghosts. They are queuing up to be slaughtered: they are already dead.
This characteristic sensation – Larkin’s ‘MCMXIV’ begins with a photo of ‘long uneven lines’ of men queuing up to enlist – is articulated by Owen in ‘The Send-Off’, a poem describing recruits about to entrain for France:
Down the close darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed . . .
The landscape they leave in these first two lines is a premonition of the one ‘a few’ may return to, ‘up half-known roads’, in the last. At the moment of departure they are already marching through the landscape of mourning. The summer of 1914 is shadowed by the dusk of drawn blinds. Before boarding the train they have joined the ranks of the dead:
Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men’s are, dead.
But Owen’s poem does not, so to speak, stop there. The train pulls out into a future that seems, to us, to stretch away from the Great War and extend to the memory of another, more recent holocaust:
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.
So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent.
‘Agony stares from each grey face.’
Relative to the scale of the slaughter, very few pictures of the British dead survived the Great War.9 This was due principally to restrictions on reporting. Only official photographers were allowed at the front; ordinary press photographers were almost totally excluded from the battle areas; front-line soldiers themselves were discouraged from carrying cameras (or keeping diaries).
Any photographs that did get taken were subject to strict censorship so that no images prejudicial to the war effort found their way into print. After the war the archives were vetted so that the number of photographs of British dead was whittled down still further10. Like all the most efficient restrictions, these successive measures worked consensually rather than simply repressively. Reflecting, establishing and perpetuating a broad agreement between state, photographers and public as to what fell within the limits of acceptable taste, they defined that which they claimed to be defined by.
The pictures that have been preserved show isolated or small groups of dead soldiers. They give no sense of death on the scale recorded by a German Field Marshal on the Eastern Front:
In the account book of the Great War, the page recording the Russian losses has been ripped out. The figures are unknown. Five million, or eight? We ourselves know not. All we do know is that, at times, fighting the Russians, we had to remove the piles of enemy bodies from before our trenches, so as to get a clear field of fire against new waves of assault.
On the Western Front, months after the Battle of the Somme had ended, John Masefield wrote how the dead still ‘lay three or four deep and the bluebottles made their faces black’.
Photographs of the missing are themselves missing.
Typically, pictures from the front line show not the dead, but people who have witnessed death. Like this well-known photograph (here) of a soldier suffering from battle fatigue. What does this face express? It is difficult to say because any word of explanation has to be qualified by its opposite: there is the most intense appeal for compassion – and an utter indifference to our response; there is reproach without accusation; a longing for justice and an indifference to whether it comes about.
We stare at the picture like Isabelle Rimbaud – sister of the poet – who, in August 1914, took water to a group of exhausted soldiers coming out of battle. ‘Where do they come from?’ she wondered. ‘What have they seen? We should greatly like to know, but they say nothing.’
What has he seen?
This picture, too, is mute. It is immune to our gaze. We are looking into the eyes of a man who has seen the untellable.
In a letter written on the last day of 1917 Owen wrote to his mother ‘of the very strange look’ he had noticed on soldiers’ faces at Etaples. It was, he said,
an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England . . . It was not despair or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, without expression, like a dead rabbit’s.
It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them.
Looking across the Channel before he did exactly that, Owen quoted a favourite passage from Rabindranath Tagore: ‘When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.’ Owen’s poems are overwhelmingly concerned with this, the fact of having seen:
. . . As under a green sea, I saw him drowning
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
He had come to France to help his men, he said, by leading them and ‘indirectly by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can’. In so doing he affirms, repeatedly, his reliability as a witness:
I saw their bitten backs curve, loop, and straighten,
I watched those agonies curl, lift, and flatten.
He focuses frequently – as in the passage from ‘Insensibility’ quoted above – on ‘the blunt and lashless eyes’ of men he has seen, men who have been blinded by what they have seen:
O Love, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!
‘O sir, my eyes – I’m blind – I’m blind, I’m blind!’
Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids
And said if he could see the least blurred light
He was not blind; in time he’d get all right.
‘I can’t,’ he sobbed. Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids’,
Watch my dreams still . . .
The anger in his poems always comes from this: from the fact of having witnessed what civilians at home could never conceive of seeing. This reaches its most intense expression in the transitional passage in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’:
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 . . .
Owen, the best-known poet of the First World War, wrote that he was ‘not concerned with Poetry’. Robert Capa, the best-known photographer of the Second, declared that he was ‘not interested in taking pretty pictures’. During the Spanish Civil War he took the most famous war photograph of all time, which showed – or purported to – the precise moment of a Republican soldier’s death in action. In his photographs of the Second World War we come across the dead almost casually, in houses and streets. A photograph from December 1944 shows a frozen winter scene with bare trees, cattle and huts in the background. A GI advances across the photo towards a body lying in the middle of the field. Some way off, beyond the margins of the frame, in the next photograph, there will be another body. Through Capa’s photos, in other words, we follow a trail of bodies. This trail leads, ultimately, to the photos of mass death at the core of our century: bodies piled up in concentration camps. Capa, personally, had no intention of photographing the concentration camps, because they ‘were swarming with photographers, and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect’.
Theodor Adorno said famously that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. Instead, he failed to add, there would be photography.
Since the concentration camps we have seen hundreds, thousands of photographs of the dead: from Cambodia, Beirut, Vietnam, Algeria, Salvador, Sarajevo. After the Second World War the work of Capa – an invented name anyway – came less to suggest an individual’s work and, increasingly, to identify the kind of photograph associated with him. The original dissol
ved into the hundreds of reproductions that came in his wake. Photographs of the dead are now ten a penny. More and more news bulletins come with the warning that some of the images in them might upset some viewers. Not only is ours a time when anyone – from Presidents of the United States to nameless peasants – might die on film; this has been the time when, to a degree, people only die on film. Like many people I have seen hundreds of bodies on film and never one in real life: an exact reversal of the typical experience of the Great War.
The drift of photography since then has been from looking into the eyes of men who have seen death to seeing things through their eyes.
A real photograph of my mother’s father: in profile, astride a horse, about to take water up to the front. In another frame, crammed between the glass and a photo showing him standing easy, are four medals. On one, attached to a rainbow-coloured ribbon, is written: THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION 1914–1919. Another, with a ribbon of fading orange-yellow stripes and blue edges, shows a figure on horseback cantering over a skull. Looking at these medals, I get the impression they were given away willy-nilly: souvenirs to ensure that no one went away empty-handed and everyone had something to show for their pains.
CERTIFICATE OF EMPLOYMENT DURING THE WAR
(Army form Z. 18)
Regtl. No. 201334 Rank: Pte
Surname: Tudor
Christian name in full: Geoffrey
Regt: KSLI
Regimental Employment – Nature of: Transport [the next word is illegible]. Trade or calling before Enlistment: Farm Labourer
Course of Instruction and Courses in Active Service Army Schools, and certificates, if any: nil
Special Remarks: This is required as a help in finding civil employment: Steady and reliable. A very good groom and drive. Takes great care of his animals.
Signed by: Major [name illegible]
The history of my family is the history of certificates like this.
Steady and Reliable – these are the qualities which have distinguished us through two world wars.
My father was given a similar reference before he was made redundant from the Gloster Aircraft Company after the Second World War. Years later, when he was made redundant again (aged sixty), he was once more commended for the reliability and steadiness he had displayed over twenty years.