Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blundered:
Theirs’ not to make reply,
Theirs’ not to reason why,
Theirs’ but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
By the twentieth century, attitudes to war had changed. Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier”, written shortly before the poet’s death in 1915, was the last glorious swan song of the poetry of War Glorified.
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
Attitudes to war had changed because war itself had changed. No longer was war a trial of strength between man and man but between man and machine, or even, and increasingly, between machine and machine—with man in the middle. There was nothing glorious about going “over the top” to certain death in a hail of machine-gun fire; nothing glorious about poison gas or barbed wire; nothing glorious about trench fever or dysentery. War was no longer about warriors but about killing machines and killing fields. War was now about machine as victor and man as victim. Fate and fatality had been replaced by fatuous futility.
Under the new conditions of modern warfare, the weapons of the warrior were as redundant as the warrior himself. Swords, sabers, scimitars and shields would gather dust or turn to rust. Now, more than ever, the pen was indeed mightier than the sword. From the filth and futility of the First World War emerged a generation of poets more potent than their predecessors in expressing the grim realities of warfare. Two, in particular, emerged phoenix-like from the ashes of the conflict. Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen wrote with a realism that shocked and shamed their compatriots out of their indifference to the suffering of the trenches. Sassoon’s “Fight to a Finish”, “The General” and “Golgotha”, and Owen’s “Spring Offensive”, “Exposure” and “Dulce et Decorum Est” changed the public’s perception of the war. In Germany, the grim power of Otto Dix’ gruesome paintings, depicting limbless victims condemned to a postwar life of squalor, confronted and still confront the complacency of the voyeuristic noncombatant. In the Second World War, Solzhenitsyn’s disturbing poem “Prussian Nights”, with its ruthlessly unremitting realism, its depiction of mass rape, arson and murder, stands as a morbid monument to the terrors of Stalinism and to the inhumanity of the Soviet regime.
Wilfrid Owen and Rupert Brooke never survived the war. Sassoon and Solzhenitsyn not only survived but surfaced from their sufferings resurgent in spirit. In both men, the suffering of war prefigured the resurrection of the spirit and the peace it heralds. In their conversion to orthodox Christianity, Sassoon and Solzhenitsyn are witnesses to the greater Peace that war can never destroy.
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WAR POETS
Cutting through the Cant
FOR THOSE WHO FEEL ACUTELY the stultifying staleness of so much modern literary criticism, Bernard Bergonzi’s new book will arrive as a breath of fresh air. Its title, though strictly accurate, tells only half the story—less than half. The war poets are the subject of only a third of the essays in the book so that the “other subjects” predominate. War Poets and Other Subjects is divided into three distinct parts: “Writers and War”, “Modern Masters” and “Catholics”. In each section, Professor Bergonzi, professor emeritus of English at the University of Warwick, exhibits a masterful control of his subject and an ability to cut through the cant of modern literary fads with a firm but gentle touch. He is never clumsy or heavy-handed and always gives those he criticizes a fair hearing. The subtle dexterity may cause some to feel that he suffers fools a little too gladly. He does not.
Bergonzi’s ability to fathom folly is most apparent in the first section of the book. His dissection of Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, a quasi-fictional account of Siegfried Sassoon’s friendship with Wilfred Owen, culminates in a complaint that Barker’s approach is marred by her lack of concern for historical truth. He reads it with “admiration but also with unease”. She is more concerned with placing her historical figures in straitjackets constructed out of certain modern preoccupations—“gender roles . . . feminism, psychotherapy, false memory syndrome, the sexual abuse of children”. Bergonzi’s unease with historical inaccuracy resurfaces in an essay entitled “The Great War and Modern Criticism” in which he questions the assumption that nationalism was a nineteenth-century invention. He alludes to the aggressive patriotism of the eighteenth century, the Englishness of Shakespeare’s history plays, and Michael Drayton’s Battle of Agincourt. He could, of course, have mentioned the battle of Agincourt itself and the nationalist mythology that grew up in its wake, or similar nationalist myths in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and countless other nations, all of which predate nineteenth-century “capitalism” by many centuries. In the same essay, he exposes the critic Adrian Caesar for the transparent shallowness of his approach, complaining that “he seems to be located beyond absolute pacifism, in a perspective where suffering has no place of any kind”. In contrast, Bergonzi praises Douglas Kerr for drawing parallels between Owen’s poetry and Dante’s Inferno, highlighting the perennial relevance of their respective approaches to the psychology of suffering.
The section on “Modern Masters” includes a discussion of Anthony West’s book about his parents, H. G. Wells and Rebecca West. The son’s bitterness toward the selfishness of his parents, particularly that of his mother, had created a love-hate triangle from which the son was powerless to escape. Other “modern masters” discussed include Aldus Huxley, George Orwell and, most notably, T. S. Eliot.
The section on Catholics features two superb essays on Gerard Manley Hopkins, an essay on Chesterton and, bravest of all, an attempt to get to grips with David Jones’ complex and often contradictory idea of art. Particularly enjoyable is an essay on “The Other Mrs. Ward”. Bergonzi’s treatment of Mrs. Wilfrid Ward’s almost forgotten novel, One Poor Scruple, is a poignant reminder of the neglected gems of the Catholic literary revival. I was left wishing that Bergonzi would turn his attention to the novels of R. H. Benson or Maurice Baring or to the deeper spiritual verse, as opposed to the satire, of Roy Campbell.
Unfortunately, the book ends on something of an anticlimactic note. The last two essays focus on Graham Greene and David Lodge, the first of whom described himself as a “Catholic agnostic” while the second prefers to be known as an “agnostic Catholic”. Bergonzi prefers to overlook these contradictions posing as paradoxes. In consequence, these essays lack the incisiveness that is so present in the rest of the book. But ultimately, War Poets and Other Subjects confirms Bergonzi’s place at the forefront of literary criticism.
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SIEGFRIED SASSOON
Poetic Pilgrimage
SIEGFRIED SASSOON is arguably the greatest of the War Poets. Arguably, but not indisputably. Many critics, begging to differ with such a judgment, would argue that Sassoon’s friend, Wilfred Owen, was more gifted and could boast a superior achievement in verse. Yet, if they are right, Sassoon becomes, if not the greatest, then certainly the most important of the War Poets. Sassoon was Owen’s mentor, without whom Owen would probably have never written the acerbically assonant verse for which both men are celebrated. Furthermore, it was Sassoon who edited Owen’s poems, following the latter’s death, introducing the public to his verse. Without Sassoon there would not have been an Owen.
Owen was killed in action on the western front in 1918, one of the final victims of the dying embers of the First World War. As such, he remains cocooned in the incorruptible image of eternal youth, a slaughtered lamb, butchered before his gifts could develop. Sassoon, on the other hand, lived to a ripe old age, growing ever closer to Christ and His Church. His life, and the poetry that was its expression, would be one long and contemplative search for truth, a poet’s pilgrimage.
Sassoon enjoyed, or rather endured, a controversially meteoric and mixed military career, his wa
r service making him both famous and infamous, hero and villain. In June 1916 he was very much the hero, being awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in battle after he had brought in under heavy fire a wounded lance corporal who was lying close to the German lines. This and other acts of bravery earned him the nickname of “Mad Jack”. Robert Graves, a fellow officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers who would himself become a poet and novelist of some distinction, remembered Sassoon calmly reading a newspaper shortly before going “over the top” during the crucial attack at Fricourt. In 1917, after capturing some German trenches in the Hindenburg Line single-handedly, he remained in the enemy position reading a volume of poems, seemingly oblivious of the danger. This particular act of cavalier gallantry earned him a recommendation for the Victoria Cross, the highest honor attainable in the British army.
Having been wounded in the fighting on the Hindenburg Line, Sassoon was invalided home. It was then that he began to reflect upon the human butchery he had witnessed, endured and inflicted. From these moments of reflection the hero hatched the villain. The perfect soldier became the pacifist rebel. “Siegfried’s unconquerable idealism changed direction with his environment”, wrote Robert Graves. “He varied between happy warrior and bitter pacifist.”
In July 1917 his “Soldier’s Declaration”, addressed ostensibly to his commanding officer but published or quoted in several newspapers, gained him notoriety. It was made “as an act of wilful defiance of military authority” and attacked those in power who were willfully prolonging “the sufferings of the troops . . . for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.” He also complained about “the callous complaisance with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of the agonies which they do not share and have not sufficient imagination to realise”.
Sassoon’s contempt for his commanding officers, expressed prosaically in his declaration, would be exemplified poetically in verses such as “Base Details” and “The General”, whereas his anger at the jingoism of politicians and the press would be captured bitterly in “Fight to a Finish”. His plaintive reaction against the “callous complaisance” of “those at home” was immortalized with gruesome realism in “Glory of Women”.
In a further gesture of defiance, Sassoon threw his Military Cross into the River Mersey, and his notoriety reached new heights when his declaration was read in the House of Commons. Many expected that such open acts of rebellion would lead to Sassoon’s court-martial, but in true Orwellian fashion, he was declared mentally overwrought and not responsible for his actions. He was sent to Craiglockhart military hospital in Edinburgh to be treated for psychological shell shock. It was here that he met and befriended Wilfred Owen.
In the midst of Sassoon’s lurid descriptions of the “base details” of war was an intrepid introspection that saw Golgotha amid the hell. Religious imagery, albeit sometimes overlaid with the irony of anger, is discernible in much of his war poetry and detectable in the very titles of many of the poems. “Absolution”, “Golgotha”, “The Redeemer” and “Stand-To: Good Friday Morning” all testify to a soul haunted by Christ even when the spirit was spurned. The spirit was most apparent in “Reconciliation”, a poem written in November 1918, the month the war finally ended. In only eight intensively potent lines, Sassoon asks his compatriots, even as they mourn their own dead, to remember the German soldiers who were killed.
In that Golgotha perhaps you’ll find
The mothers of the men who killed your son.
With the war ended, Sassoon, like many of his contemporaries, found himself lost in, and alienated by, the nihilistic no-man’s land, or Eliotic “wasteland”, of postwar England. Apart from the solace sought in the writing of his own verse, Sassoon gained consolation in the poetry of others. He defended the provocative modernity of Edith Sitwell, writing an article defending her work in the Daily Herald under the combative title “Too Fantastic for Fat-Heads”. He also found solace in music, defending the provocative modernity of Stravinsky in one of his finest poems, “Concert-Interpretation”, in which the Russian composer’s controversial Le sacre du printemps inspires the English poet to muse with ambient ambivalence that the “polyphony through dissonance” of Stravinksy’s work reminds him of a “serpent-conscious Eden, crude but pleasant”. A different spirit pervades “Sheldonian Soliloquy”, possibly Sassoon’s best known postwar poem, in which his feelings of elation during a recital of Bach’s Mass in B Minor are expressed with delightful and cathartic whimsy.
Hosanna in excelsis chants the choir
In pious contrapuntal jubilee.
Hosanna shrill the birds in sunset fire.
And Benedictus sings my heart to Me.
Written in 1922, there is in “Sheldonian Soliloquy”, as in many of his war poems, a tantalizing glimpse of an embryonic Christianity that would have a further thirty-five-year gestation period. In the interim, Sassoon became as respected for his prose as for his poetry. His semi-fictitious autobiography, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, published in 1937, was begun with Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man in 1928, continued with Memoirs of an Infantry Officer in 1930 and concluded with Sherston’s Progress in 1936. Truly autobiographical works followed. The Old Century was published in 1938, The Weald of Youth in 1942 and Siegfried’s Journey 1916-20 in 1945.
Neither the “journey” of Siegfried nor the “progress” of Sherston ended in 1945, the year in which the last of his autobiographical works of prose was published. On the contrary, the ending of the Second World War marked a new beginning for the poet. In spite of the success of the prose volumes, the most profound autobiography of the poet was to be found in his poems. Arranged chronologically, they offer an impressionistic picture of a heart’s journey toward God and that heart’s progress through the trials and tribulations of life.
The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima inspired Sassoon to the same heights of horrified creativity as had inspired Sitwell in the composition of her “three poems of the Atomic Age”. Sassoon’s “Litany of the Lost” employed resonant religious imagery as a counterpoint to the postwar pessimism and alienation engendered by the descent from world war to cold war. As with the previous war, the world had emerged from the nightmare of conflict into the desert of despair, transforming “wasteland” to nuclear waste.
The ending of the second of the century’s global conflagrations marked the beginning of Sassoon’s final approach to the Catholic faith. Influenced to a degree by Catholic friends such as Ronald Knox and Hilaire Belloc, but to a far greater degree by the experience of his own life, Sassoon was received into the Church in September 1957, shortly after his seventy-first birthday. After a lifetime of mystical searching, he had finally found his way Home.
During his first Lent as a Catholic, Sassoon wrote “Lenten Illuminations”, a candid account of his conversion that invites obvious comparisons with T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday”. The last decade of his life, like the last decades of the Rosary he came to love, was a quiet meditation on the glorious mysteries of faith. As ever, his meditations were expressed in memorable verse, particularly in the peaceful mysticism of “A Prayer at Pentecost”, “Arbor Vitae” and “A Prayer in Old Age”.
In 1960 Sassoon selected thirty of his poems for a volume entitled The Path to Peace, which was essentially an autobiography in verse. From the earliest sonnets of his youth to the religious poetry of his last years, Sassoon’s intensely personal and introspective verse offered a sublime reflection of a life’s journey in pursuit of truth. These, and not his diaries, his letters or his prose, are the precious jewels of enlightenment that point to the soul within the man.
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EMERGING FROM THE WASTELAND
The Cultural Reaction to the Desert of Modernity
MUCH OF WHAT COULD BE CALLED “Old Europe” was killed off by the First World War. I am aware that, to a degree, this is an oversimplification. If Hilaire Belloc’s assertion that “Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe�
�� is to be taken seriously, and I think that it should be, much of Old Europe was killed off by the Reformation four hundred years earlier. (Incidentally, Belloc was not suggesting in this statement that the Faith was only European—indeed, he publicly and stringently denied that he had meant this when someone suggested that this had been his meaning. He meant that Europe, properly understood, was only the Faith—in the sense that the concept of Europe was bound up with the concept of Christendom. Take away Christendom as the unifying principle and the whole edifice of Europe begins to crumble.) If this is so, and as I have said, I believe that it is, Europe has been crumbling since the heresies of Luther and Calvin undermined its unifying principle.
This is the theme of Chesterton’s epic poem, “Lepanto”, written in 1912, two years before the start of the First World War. Europe in the sixteenth century is being overwhelmed by Protestant heresy and undermined by late-Renaissance decadence. This poison from within is being exacerbated by the Muslim threat from without. A weakened Europe is in danger of being overthrown by a resurgent Islam. (The more things change, the more they remain the same!)
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
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