The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Psychoanalysis was not the only method of treatment tried, and in its classical form it took too long to have an effect. But that wasn’t the point. Both the Allied and Central powers found that officers were succumbing as well as enlisted men, in many cases highly trained and hitherto very brave men; these behaviours could not in any sense be called malingering. And such was the toll of men in the war that clinics well behind enemy lines, and even back home, became necessary so that soldiers could be treated, and then returned to the front.45 Two episodes will show how the war helped bring psychoanalysis within the fold. The first occurred in February 1918, when Freud received a copy of a paper by Ernst Simmel, a German doctor who had been in a field hospital as a medical staff officer. He had used hypnosis to treat so-called malingerers but had also constructed a human dummy against which his patients could vent their repressed aggression. Simmel had found his method so successful that he had applied to the German Secretary of State for War for funds for a plan to set up a psychoanalytic clinic. Although the German government never took any action on this plan during wartime, they did send an observer to the International Congress of Psychoanalysis in 1918 in Budapest.46 The second episode took place in 1920 when the Austrian government set up a commission to investigate the claims against Julius von Wagner–Jauregg, a professor of psychiatry in Vienna. Wagner-Jauregg was a very distinguished doctor who won the Nobel Prize in 1927 for his work on the virtual extinction of cretinism (mental retardation caused by thyroid deficiency) in Europe, by countering the lack of iodine in the diet. During the war Wagner-Jauregg had been responsible for the treatment of battle casualties, and in the aftermath of defeat there had been many complaints from troops about the brutality of some of his treatments, including electric-shock therapy. Freud was called before the commission, and his testimony, and Wagner-Jauregg’s, were soon seen as a head-to-head tussle of rival theories. The commission decided that there was no case against Wagner-Jauregg, but the very fact that Freud had been called by a government-sponsored commission was one of the first signs of his more general acceptance. As Freud’s biographer Ronald Clark says, the Freudian age dates from this moment.47

  ‘At no other time in the twentieth century has verse formed the dominant literary form’ as it did in World War I (at least in the English language), and there are those, such as Bernard Bergonzi, whose words these are, who argue that English poetry ‘never got over the Great War.’ To quote Francis Hope, ‘In a not altogether rhetorical sense, all poetry written since 1918 is war poetry.’48 In retrospect it is not difficult to see why this should have been so. Many of the young men who went to the front were well educated, which in those days included being familiar with English literature. Life at the front, being intense and uncertain, lent itself to the shorter, sharper, more compact structure of verse, war providing unusual and vivid images in abundance. And in the unhappy event of the poet’s death, the elegiac nature of a slim volume had an undeniable romantic appeal. Many boys who went straight from the cricket field to the Somme or Passchendaele made poor poets, and the bookshops were crammed with verse that, in other circumstances, would never have been published. But amid these a few stood out, and of those a number are now household names.49

  The poets writing during World War I can be divided into two groups. There were those early poets who wrote about the glory of war and were then killed. And there were those who, killed or not, lived long enough to witness the carnage and horror, the awful waste and stupidity that characterised so much of the 1914–18 war.50 Rupert Brooke is the best known of the former group. It has been said of Brooke that he was prepared all his short life for the role of war poet/martyr. He was handsome, with striking blond hair; he was clever, somewhat theatrical, a product of the Cambridge milieu that, had he lived, would surely have drawn him to Bloomsbury. Frances Cornford wrote a short stanza about him while he was still at Cambridge:

  A young Apollo, golden-haired,

  Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,

  Magnificently unprepared

  For the long littleness of life.51

  Before the war Brooke was one of the Georgian Poets who celebrated rural England; their favoured techniques were unpretentious and blunt, if somewhat complacent.52 In 1914 there had been no major war for a hundred years, since Waterloo in 1815; reacting to the unknown was therefore not easy. Many of Brooke’s poems were written in the early weeks of the war when many people, on both sides, assumed that hostilities would be over very quickly. He saw brief action outside Antwerp in the autumn of 1914 but was never really in any danger. A number of his poems were published in an anthology called New Numbers. Little notice was taken of them until on Easter Sunday, 1915, the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral quoted Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ in his sermon. As a result The Times of London reprinted the poem, which gave Brooke a much wider audience. A week later his death was reported. It wasn’t a ‘glamorous’ death, for he had died from blood poisoning in the Aegean; he had not been killed in the fighting, but he had been on active service, on his way to Gallipoli, and the news turned him into a hero.53

  Several people, including his fellow poet Ivor Gurney, have remarked that Brooke’s poetry is less about war than about what the English felt – or wanted to feel – about the events of the early months of the war.54 In other words, they tell us more about the popular state of mind in England than about Brooke’s own experience of fighting in the war at the front. His most famous is ‘The Soldier’ (1914):

  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.

  Robert Graves, born in Wimbledon in 1895, was the son of the Irish poet Alfred Perceval Graves. While serving in France, he was wounded, lay unconscious on a stretcher in a converted German dressing station, and was given up for dead.55 Graves was always interested in mythology, and his verse was curiously distant and uncomfortable. One of his poems describes the first corpse he had seen – a German dead on the trench wire whom, therefore, Graves couldn’t bury. This was hardly propaganda poetry, and indeed many of Graves’s stanzas rail against the stupidity and bureaucratic futility of the conflict. Most powerful perhaps is his reversal of many familiar myths:

  One cruel backhand sabre-cut –

  ‘I’m hit! I’m killed!’ young David cries,

  Throws blindly forward, chokes … and dies.

  Steel-helmeted and grey and grim

  Goliath straddles over him.56

  This is antiheroic, deflating and bitter. Goliath isn’t supposed to win. Graves himself suppressed his poetry of war, though Poems about War was reissued after his death in 1985.57

  Unlike Brooke and Graves, Isaac Rosenberg did not come from a middle-class, public school background, nor had he grown up in the country. He was born into a poor Jewish family in Bristol and spent his childhood in London’s East End, suffering indifferent health.58 He left school at fourteen, and some wealthy friends who recognised his talents paid for him to attend the Slade School to learn painting, where he met David Bomberg, C. R. W. Nevinson, and Stanley Spencer.59 He joined the army, he said, not for patriotic reasons but because his mother would benefit from the separation allowance. He found army life irksome and never rose above private. But never having been schooled in any poetic tradition, he approached the war in a particular way. He kept art and life separate and did not try to turn the war into metaphor; rather he grappled with the unusual images it offered to re-create the experience of war, which is a part of life and yet not part of most people’s lives:

  The darkness crumbles away–

  It is the same old druid Time as ever.

  Only a live
thing leaps my hand–

  A queer sardonic rat –

  As I pull the parapet’s poppy

  To stick behind my ear.

  And later,

  Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins

  Drop, and are ever dropping;

  But mine in my ear is safe,

  Just a little white with the dust.

  –‘Break of Day in the Trenches,’ 1916

  Above all, you are with Rosenberg. The rat, skittering through no-man’s-land with a freedom no man enjoys, the poppies, drawing life from the blood-sodden ground, are powerful as images, but it is the immediacy of the situation that is conveyed. As he said in a letter, his style was ‘surely as simple as ordinary talk.’60 Rosenberg’s is an unflinching gaze, but it is also understated. The horror speaks for itself. This is perhaps why Rosenberg’s verse has lost less of its power than other war poems as the years have gone by. He was killed on April Fool’s Day, 1918.

  Wilfred Owen is generally regarded as Rosenberg’s only equal, and maybe even his superior. Born in Oswestry in Shropshire in 1893, into a religious, traditional family, Owen was twenty-one when war was declared.61 After matriculating at London University, he became the pupil and lay assistant to a vicar in an Oxfordshire village, then obtained a post as a tutor in English at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux. In 1914, after war broke out, he witnessed the first French casualties arriving at the hospital in Bordeaux and wrote home to his mother vividly describing their wounds and his pity. In October 1915 he was accepted for the Artists’ Rifles (imagine a regiment with that name now) but was commissioned in the Manchester Regiment. He sailed to France on active service at the end of December 1916, attached to the Lancashire Fusiliers. By then, the situation at the front was in strong contrast to the image of the front being kept alive by government propaganda back home.

  Owen’s first tour of duty on the Somme was an overwhelming experience, as his letters make clear, and he went through a rapid and remarkable period of maturing. He was injured in March 1917 and invalided home via a series of hospitals, until he ended up in June in Craiglockhart Hospital outside Edinburgh, which, says his biographer, ‘was the most considerable watershed in Wilfred’s short life.’62 This was the famous psychiatric hospital where W. H. Rivers, one of the medical staff, was making early studies, and cures, of shell shock. While at Craiglockhart, Owen met Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon, who both left a record of the encounter in their memoirs. Sassoon’s Siegfried’s Journey (not published until 1948) has this to say about their poetry: ‘My trench sketches were like rockets, sent up to illuminate the darkness. They were the first of their kind, and could claim to be opportune. It was Owen who revealed how, out of realistic horror and scorn, poetry might be made.’63 Owen went back to the front in September 1918, partly because he believed in that way he might argue more forcefully against the war. In October he won the Military Cross for his part in a successful attack on the Beaurevoir-Fonsomme line. It was during his final year that his best poems were composed. In ‘Futility’ (1918), Owen is light years away from Brooke and very far even from Rosenberg. He paints a savage picture of the soldier’s world, a world very different from anything his readers back home would have ever encountered. His target is the destruction of youth, the slaughter, the maiming, the sense that it might go on for ever, while at the same time he discovers a language wherein the horror may be shown in a clear, beautiful, but always terrible way:

  Move him into the sun –

  Gently its touch awoke him once,

  At home, whispering of fields unsown.

  Always it woke him, even in France,

  Until this morning and this snow.

  If anything might rouse him now

  The kind old sun will know.

  Think how it wakes the seeds –

  Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.

  Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,

  Full-nerved – still warm – too hard to stir?

  Was it for this the clay grew tall?

  – O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

  To break earth’s sleep at all?

  In poems like ‘The Sentry’ and ‘Counter-Attack,’ the physical conditions and the terror are locked into the words; carnage can occur at any moment.

  We’d found an old Boche dug out, and he knew,

  And gave us hell; for shell on frantic shell

  Lit full on top, but never quite burst through.

  Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime,

  Kept slush waist-high and rising hour by hour

  For Owen the war can never be a metaphor for anything – it is too big, too horrific, to be anything other than itself. His poems need to be read for their cumulative effect. They are not rockets ‘illuminating the darkness’ (as Sassoon described his own work), but rather like heavy artillery shells, pitting the landscape with continual bombardment. The country has failed Owen; so has the church; so – he fears – has he failed himself. All that is left is the experience of war.64

  I have made fellowships –

  Untold of happy lovers in old song.

  For love is not the binding of fair lips

  With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,

  By Joy, whose ribbon slips, –

  But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong;

  Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;

  Knit in the webbing of the rifle-thong.

  –Apologia Pro Poemate Meo, 1917

  Owen saw himself, in Bernard Bergonzi’s felicitous phrase, as both priest and victim. W. B. Yeats notoriously left him out of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) with the verdict that ‘passive suffering was not a proper subject for poetry,’ a spiteful remark that some critics have put down to jealousy. Owen’s verse has certainly lasted. He was killed in action, trying to get his men across the Sambre Canal. It was 4 November 1918, and the war had less than a week to go.

  The war in many ways changed incontrovertibly the way we think and what we think about. In 1975, in The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell, then a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and now at the University of Pennsylvania, explored some of these changes. After the war the idea of progress was reversed, for many a belief in God was no longer sustainable, and irony – a form of distance from feeling – ‘entered the modern soul as a permanent resident.’65 Fussell also dates what he calls ‘the modern versus habit’ to the war – that is, a dissolution of ambiguity as a thing to be valued, to be replaced instead by ‘a sense of polarity’ where the enemy is so wicked that his position is deemed a flaw or perversion, so that ‘its total submission is called for.’ He noted the heightened erotic sense of the British during the war, one aspect being the number of women who had lost lovers at the front and who came together afterward to form lesbian couples – a common sight in the 1920s and 1930s. In turn, this pattern may have contributed to a general view that female homosexuality was more unusual in its aetiology than is in fact the case. But it may have made lesbianism more acceptable as a result, being overlaid with sympathy and grief.

  Building on the work of Fussell, Jay Winter, in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995), made the point that the apocalyptic nature of the carnage and the unprecedented amount of bereavement that it caused drove many people away from the novelties of modernism – abstraction, vers libre, atonalism and the rest – and back to more traditional forms of expression.66 War memorials in particular were realistic, simple, conservative. Even the arts produced by avant-gardists – Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Stanley Spencer, and even Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso in their collaboration with Erik Satie on his modernist ballet Parade (1917) – fell back on traditional and even Christian images and themes as the only narratives and myths that could make sense of the overwhelming nature of ‘a massive problem shared.’67 In France, there was a resurgence of images d’Epinal, pietistic posters that had not been popular since the early nineteenth century, and a reappea
rance of apocalyptic, ‘unmodern’ literature, especially but not only in France: Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu and Karl Kraus’s Last Days of Mankind are two examples. Despite its being denounced by the Holy See, there was a huge increase in spiritualism as an attempt to talk to the dead. And this was not merely a fad among the less well educated. In France the Institut Métaphysique was headed by Charles Richet, Nobel Prize-winning physiologist, while in Britain the president of the Society for Psychical Research was Sir Oliver Lodge, professor of physics at Liverpool University and later principal of Birmingham University.68 Winter included in his book ‘spirit photographs’ taken at the Remembrance Day ceremony in Whitehall in 1922, when the dead allegedly appeared to watch the proceedings. Abel Gance used a similar approach in one of the great postwar films, J’accuse (1919), in which the dead in a battlefield graveyard rise up with their bandages and crutches and walking sticks and return to their villages, to see if their sacrifices were worth it: ‘The sight of the fallen so terrifies the townspeople that they immediately mend their ways, and the dead return to their graves, their mission fulfilled.’69 They were easily satisfied.