by Philip Hoare
Boys
Breaking the surface of the ebony pond.
Flashes
Of swimmers carving through the sparkling cold.
Fleshes
Gleaming wetness to the morning gold.
He knew what he was doing. He was becoming a modern artist, physically expressed in his body. Even here, in the soft light of southern France, the seismic shocks of the war that would transform him were felt as disturbances in the air. Women cried in the streets, and Wilfred looked to the mountains of Spain in the distance, wondering if he ought to take refuge there. The wounded were arriving from the front; he saw German prisoners of war kept in cages. ‘I like to think that this is the last War of the World!’ he told his younger brother Colin, as though sharing some science-fiction comic.
Charted in his letters, the slow, inevitable speed of Owen’s assumption into war is frightening and obvious, as if he were cycling into it. I look at his bookended dates and wish I could have written a different biography for him. Perhaps if he hadn’t written it all down, or if I hadn’t read it, it might not have happened. I might have seen him in the nineteen-seventies, an old man with a greying moustache on Meadfoot beach, looking out to sea, looking back into a past that never happened.
Giving up teaching, Wilfred returned to Bordeaux and became a perfume salesman – a somewhat decadent occupation in wartime, although Stephen Tennant would have approved – then returned to London, crossing a sea sown with mines, patrolled below by U-boats and threatened overhead by Zeppelins.
Yet even this close to the point of no return, he was torn between art and war. He walked through the East End and down to the river at Limehouse, a tidal place with its own secrets. He saw a ‘godlike youth … with blood-red lips’ whom he dared not approach, and who merged with a shadow he met on Shadwell Stair, its steps leading into the Pool of London. This boy’s eyes reflected ‘moons and lamps in the full Thames’, and this water – another kind of danger zone – mirrored Owen’s desires, ‘Like the sleepy tide upon the sands | To feel and follow a man’s delight’.
But such Wildean scenes had been banished by a strident new voice. Rupert Brooke’s sonnet saw the fighting as an antidote to ennui: ‘To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, | Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary’. To Wilfred, a stark choice presented itself. ‘I have made soundings in deep waters,’ he told his mother, ‘and I have looked out from many observation-towers: and I found the deep waters terrible, and nearly lost my breath there.’
He took a headlong dive. Once his decision had been made, the transition was abrupt, and shocking. On 21 October 1915 Owen was sworn in at the headquarters of the Artists Rifles in Bloomsbury; given that he felt he was enlisting to defend poetry, his choice of recruitment station, in an area of modernist dissent inhabited by Woolf and her war-resisting peers, is ironic. Within weeks his body was subordinated and subsumed into the military machine at camps in Essex and Aldershot, far from Lake District evangelicals, and even further from elegant French villas and the proffered embraces of older women and one-eyed anarchist poets.
A photograph taken around this time, only recently discovered, shows Owen in an ill-fitting greatcoat, handed to him straight from the stores. Its thick, rough wool – more like a blanket – is pulled in at the waist by a webbing belt. It swamps his little body, hanging off his shoulders. But what surprises most is the smile on his face. If it weren’t for the rather tentative moustache, he’d look like a ten-year-old who’d just scored a goal. He grins from ear to ear, showing off his white teeth and his dimples. He looks like a boy you knew at school. He simply seems pleased to be a soldier.
By the summer of 1916, the transformation was complete. His fringe, which once fell carelessly over his broad forehead, was cropped (‘Note I wear my hair ½ in long now’), so brutally that his brother would seek to censor these images too. Harold was amazed when he called unexpectedly on Wilfred in his barracks that September to find him ‘clad in khaki slacks and nothing else’, his bare torso impressively developed, toughened by training during which, like other officers, he had grown an inch in height.
Owen the suburban boy had become a sophisticated officer, with offhand manners to match. He rose from his camp bed and dressed himself, assuming an elegant persona ordered from smart London shops. His Pope & Bradley tunic, waisted and epauletted, emphasised his new body; his torso was restrained by the Sam Browne belt slung across his chest, the leather lovingly buffed with a velvet shoe pad. His neatly parted, cropped hair was slick with brilliantine and groomed, like his clothes, with ivory-backed brushes from Swaine Adeney. The silkily knotted tie and collar-pin, the gleaming boots and riding crop – these were all part of a modern poet’s armour in time of war: close-fitting, tailored, belted, buttoned and buckled. He was laced and strapped and tied and bound by the state, right down to his putteed legs. It was as if Wilde had been sent to war rather than Oxford; the aesthete’s green had turned into military khaki, as though already muddied by the trenches. His fellow officers were ‘desperate nuts in dress: as befits our calling, and immemorial custom of all gallants’; their favourite ‘Flash’ was to sport a violet handkerchief trailing from their khaki pockets. Wilfred felt that was a bit too flash – and a dishonour to that noble colour, purple. Nevertheless, he doused his handkerchief in scent to stave off the stink of sick horses, much as a Regency dandy had recourse to his vinegrette in the odiferous streets of Piccadilly.
Photographed by his uncle that summer, his face is startlingly modern. He could be anything, but this is what he has decided to be, for this particular moment. He is boyishly tanned, gazing under his peaked cap through grey-brown eyes, faintly smiling under his ‘soldierly moustache’, knowing, as we all do at that age, that deep inside he was not really a part of this at all; that this was just another skin which would eventually be shed. ‘Outwardly I will conform,’ he told Harold, ‘my inward force will be the greater for it.’ Finally his name was in print, but not in the way he’d imagined –
W.E.S. Owen, CDT
– reduced to tiny initials in the gazette pages of The Times, signifying nothing more glorious than an assimilation into the system, along with column inches of other officers. Only when you see him next to those fellow officers – of the Fifth (Reserve) Battalion, under the pines of their Surrey campsite – do you realise how small he is, and how different, for all his efforts to look the same. He might be a particularly elegant Boy Scout. Yet he was now in charge of other men, younger and older than him. Power and duty became him. His instincts lay with the other ranks; his snobbish side allied with the officers: ‘I am marooned on a Crag of superiority in an ocean of soldiers.’ As a second lieutenant out training his platoon, he could break off from his duties on a hot summer’s afternoon by the side of a Hampshire lake – the order having been given for bathing to be allowed – and wander to a secluded cove where he found ‘a solitary, mysterious kind of boy’, the son of a Portuguese aristocrat, to swim with. He had a knack of finding such temporary companions. We forget, perhaps, what a charming man he was; or how sensually charged a war can be.
And Owen was a remarkably good soldier – good with his men, and an expert shot. Having proved that he could serve, that he had a place, he was determined to become an even more ambitious part of the war effort, in the Royal Flying Corps. ‘By Hermes I shall fly,’ he told his mother, turning himself into a young god. ‘I will yet swoop over Wrekin with the strength of a thousand Eagles … the pinion of Hermes, who is called Mercury, upon my cap. Then I will publish my ode on the Swift. If I fall, I shall fall mightily. I shall be with Perseus and Icarus, whom I loved; and not with Fritz, whom I do not hate. To battle with the Super-Zeppelin, when he comes, this would be chivalry more than Arthur dreamed of …’ Earlier, he had seen his first Zeppelin in the skies over his Essex camp, its whalish body picked out in the searchlights. ‘The beast looked frightened somehow,’ he wrote, as he watched it nose about as if lost, only to vanish into a cloud which, he tho
ught, was of its own making.
Wilfred was thinking of his favourite painting, Lament for Icarus, by Herbert James Draper, which was on display in the Tate Gallery, on the banks of the Thames. Draper liked to depict nude sirens decorously draped with seaweed in an imaginary sea; his Icarus, painted in 1898, sprawls on a rock in blue-green water, as if dragged out of Brueghel’s sea, or the Thames at Limehouse. The youth’s semi-naked body has been tanned by his close approach to the sun; he lies spreadeagled and folded in his huge but defunct wings, which Draper modelled on those of a bird of paradise.
But a painting in the Tate, no matter how heroic, was no substitute for the real thing: ‘Betimes I have a horrible great craving to behold the sea.’ Wilfred’s wish was granted that autumn, when he was sent to Southport for training – only to discover the tide there ran out so far over the wide flat sands – where half a century before Herman Melville had met Nathaniel Hawthorne and confessed his thoughts of self-destruction – that it was the ‘most unsatisfactory sea-side place in Europe’. Wilfred was under military manners but he could have still been a boy, writing home after leaving Torquay, ‘how I miss my morning bathe’. Within weeks he was on his way back to France; not as a young man in a dapper suit in pursuit of sensation, nor even a newly-fledged hero, but as a uniformed officer charged with the absolute implementation of violence. Those few miles of water between his island home and the embattled continent represented a new gulf. He already looked back to another life, ‘the days when my stars were bright from their creation by Pope & Bradley’. Inexorably, he was ordered to war, to experience its pity, and its pitilessness.
As he got nearer the front, Owen was physically assailed by the noise. It both repelled and drew him on. His duty was to minister to his men, much as he had ministered to the parish of Dunsden, ‘and this very day I knelt down with a candle and watched each man perform his anointment with Whale Oil’. Like a priest at the Mass of the Last Supper, he supervised them as they prepared for the flooded trenches by rubbing their bare feet with rendered-down blubber.
For these men, their future condition would be amphibian; this was a fearful morning bathe. Owen and his company were sent into the worst conditions on the Western Front, where the land had become ‘an octopus of sucking clay’, navigable only by aquatic duckboards. Bomb craters were bottomless lakes in which men drowned; others only managed to extract themselves by leaving their equipment and even their clothes behind – a weird, Stanley Spencer scene of resurrection, white bodies reborn out of primordial mud. These warriors were dressed ready to fish for some evil prey: Owen was ‘transformed now, wearing a steel helmet, buff jerkin of leather, rubber-waders up to the hips & gauntlets. But for the rifle, we are exactly like Cromwellian Troopers,’ lacking only the lobster-tailed helmets of the New Model Army. He could hardly breathe under his tin hat; when he took it off at night, he took in lungfuls of air, as if he’d been bolted into a brass diving helmet. He seemed to be walking on the sea bed. ‘In 2½ miles of trench which I waded yesterday there was not one inch of dry ground. There is a mean depth of 2 feet of water.’
It was a nightmarish version of those seaside days. He was weighed down; sinking, not swimming. Water had become protean and terrible, as it had for Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her memory of her drowned brother, evoked in Aurora Leigh: ‘When something floats up suddenly, out there, | Turns over … a dead face, known once alive –’. Arriving in the bombed-out village of Bouchoir, Wilfred found a copy of Mrs Browning’s collected poems, and in the battered book he underlined a passage from Aurora Leigh: ‘See the earth, | The body of our body, the green earth | Indubitably human, like this flesh.’ She was following him into the mire, picking her way through the devastation in her dark crinoline gown. Her words accompanied him as his mind wandered from the primordial mud to his internal ear, ‘having listened so long to her low, sighing voice (which can be heard often through the page,) and having seen her hair, not in a museum case, but palpably in visions …’
But this was no place for poets. This was nature suborned, perverted, and destroyed. Brooke’s clean swimmers wallowed in flooded trenches and their own dung. The countryside looked more like the blackened mud and debris left on the beach at low tide, with explosive shells instead of their marine equivalents and the buried dead constantly disinterred by each new wave of fighting. It was an inundated deathscape no silent film could record; although perhaps Shelley had foreseen this apocalypse, in which machines spewed Promethean fire and raptors pecked at heroes’ bones.
At one point Owen’s platoon took shelter in an empty German dugout, accessed by a tunnel which descended as deep as the height of a house. They remained for almost two days in this earthy chamber, like some prehistoric barrow, up to their knees in water which was rising ever further, while the enemy fired directly at them.
The men shook, spewed and shat themselves in fear. At one point the sentry Owen had posted at the top of the tunnel was hit, and came tumbling down the steps, ‘sploshing in the flood, deluging muck’. He was not dead, but he could not see.
‘O sir – my eyes, – I’m blind, – I’m blind, – I’m blind!’
Owen held a candle to his face, telling him that if he could see ‘the least blurred light’, he’d be all right. But he sobbed his reply, ‘I can’t.’ His ‘eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids’’, would haunt Owen for the rest of his life.
Everything was overcome. In his own desperation, Owen even considered allowing himself to succumb: ‘I nearly broke down and let myself drown in the water that was now slowly rising over my knees.’ Water had become a fetid medium in which war bred: as though Turner had reprised his Sunrise with Sea Monsters out of the Flanders mire, lashed to a lumbering tank – a land ship – while other armoured leviathans surfed over shell holes and sunken lanes like his scaly beasts, watched all the while by the helmeted enemy through submarine periscopes.
All the devils really were here. ‘Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language and nothing but foul, even from one’s own mouth (for all are devil ridden), everything unnatural, broken, blasted,’ Owen told his mother, invoking a seventh hell, scattered with the distorted bodies of the dead, ‘the most execrable sights on earth’.
Claude Grahame-White’s salesman’s prophecy had become a real war of the world, an alien invasion of machines that aped animals. Wasp-like aircraft buzzed overhead while whale-like Zeppelins, ominous five-hundred-foot-long, skin-covered shapes sailing over the German Ocean, dropped bombs on English resorts and even hovered over the shore where I swim. Britain was no longer safe as an island. The sea that surrounded it was now a conduit of disaster rather than trade or pleasure. It boiled and bled from below, as Virginia Woolf would write in To the Lighthouse. As the submarine peril increased, fear drove some to seek supernatural aid: the cost of a talismanic caul increased from one and six to three guineas for those who wished to protect their loved ones from drowning.
Meanwhile whales were mistaken for U-boats and blown up, or used as target practice, while their blubber was processed into nitroglycerine. The demand was sated by the slaughter of eighty thousand cetaceans, their bodies processed in remote whaling stations by other hip-booted men. Animals became by-products and victims of a great war in which as many horses died as men. It was a war for natural resources, the first war of the Anthropocene, an augury of extinction. In 1917 Siegfried Sassoon was appalled to discover that the real aim of the conflict was ‘essentially acquisitive, what we were fighting for was the Mesopotamian Oil Wells’. The machine was all-consuming, killing more whales and sinking more wells into oceans of oil, producing the raw material for more war. It was an inequitable, international exchange rate. In her diary, Woolf recorded that to kill one German at the Somme in 1916 cost Britain one thousand pounds; a year later, the price had risen to three thousand.
Sunk deep in those trenches, men donned aqualung-like masks against the waves of gas in ‘an ecstasy of fumbling’. One soldier unable to do so in time was watched by O
wen: ‘Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, | As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.’ The poet’s nerves, already raw, were brought to a state of exposure in those nine days at the front, each day worse than the last. As he slept on a railway embankment, a large shell landed barely two yards from his head, blowing him into the air, his body briefly leaving the earth. It was another transformation. A rebirth, of sorts.
At first it seemed he had only slight concussion; but a few days later he was observed, as his army file records, ‘to be shaky and tremulous, and his conduct and manner were peculiar, and his memory was confused’. He was suffering from shell-shock, brought on not by the explosion, but by the fact that he had lain in a pit for two days, sheltering under a sheet of corrugated iron next to his fellow officer, Second Lieutenant Gaukroger, who had been killed a week before and who now lay around him, in pieces.
Slowly, he was moved back to the sea. Étretat, a resort twenty miles north of Le Havre, was famous for its chalk cliffs, arches and stacks, much painted by the Impressionists. It too had become an anteroom of war, filled with khaki uniforms and materiel going one way, and doctors and nurses dealing with the results on the return journey. But it also represented the clear blue sea he loved. He was kept in a marquee on the lawn of a hospital run by the Americans – a reminder of his swimming friend Russell, himself now serving in the war, having found wings of his own in the intelligence department of the US Army, preparing maps for the 29th Engineers. It was as if Wilfred had finally been able to take up Tarr’s offer; like Woolf, he conjured up a continent he would never see.