This post features one of my favourite quotations from World War One – and one of the best-known war poems of modern times.
The quotation is from John Viscount Morley‘s Memorandum of Resignation from the cabinet of John Asquith in August 1914, at the outbreak of war.
John Morley - a real hero of the Great War
Morely resigned when it became clear a majority of the British cabinet supported the push, led by Foreign Minister Edward Grey, to declare war on Germany.
John Morley was one of the very few members of the cabinet who remained steadfast in opposing Britain’s entry into the war. This short extract from his memorandum is eerily prescient:
“…What grounds for expecting that the ruinous waste and havoc of war would be repaid by peace on better terms than were already within reach of reason and persistent patience. When we counted our gains, what would they amount to, when reckoned against the ferocious hatred that would burn with inextinguishable fire, for a whole generation at least, between two great communities better fitted to understand one another than any other pair in Europe? This moral devastation is a worse incident of war even than human carnage, and all the other curses with which war lashes its victims and its dupes.”
Morely was to be proven right.The flame of conflict lit in August 1914 wasn’t extinguished for a generation. By that time, the world had been transformed and a ‘war culture’ firmly entrenched in Britain and the USA. How differently things might have turned out, had the British and German people co-operated throughout the whole of the 20th century, instead of bleeding each other dry in two savage episodes of mutual mass destruction.
Morley’s whole memorandum is well worth reading. He argues persuasively that the stated grounds for Britain’s declaration of war – defense of Belgian neutrality – were merely a pretext. By the time Belgium emerged as an issue, Grey and the war faction had no intention of staying out of the conflict.
The rest, as the saying goes, is history…
Although casualties as a whole were higher in World War Two, British casualties in World War One have never been matched, before or since.
It’s small consolation that the killing fields gave rise to some outstanding English-language war poetry (hard to imagine anything comparable emerging from today’s ‘professional’ British Army).
One of the most powerful indictments of war I’ve ever read is ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen:
Dulce et Decorum Est1
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares2 we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest3 began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots4
Of tired, outstripped5 Five-Nines6 that dropped behind.
Gas!7 Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets8 just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime9 . . .
Dim, through the misty panes10 and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering,11 choking, drowning.
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,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud12
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest13
To children ardent14 for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.15
- 8 October 1917 – March, 1918
- DULCE ET DECORUM EST – the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean “It is sweet and right.” The full saying ends the poem: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” – it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country
- rockets which were sent up to burn with a brilliant glare to light up men and other targets in the area between the front lines
- a camp away from the front line where exhausted soldiers might rest for a few days, or longer
- the noise made by the shells rushing through the air
- outpaced, the soldiers have struggled beyond the reach of these shells which are now falling behind them as they struggle away from the scene of battle
- Five-Nines – 5.9 calibre explosive shells
- poison gas. From the symptoms it would appear to be chlorine or phosgene gas. The filling of the lungs with fluid had the same effects as when a person drowned
- the early name for gas masks
- a white chalky substance which can burn live tissue
- the glass in the eyepieces of the gas masks
- Owen probably meant flickering out like a candle or gurgling like water draining down a gutter, referring to the sounds in the throat of the choking man, or it might be a sound partly like stuttering and partly like gurgling
- normally the regurgitated grass that cows chew; here a similar looking material was issuing from the soldier’s mouth
- high zest – idealistic enthusiasm, keenly believing in the rightness of the idea
- keen
- see note 1
A brilliant poet who caught the collective death-wish
For years, I simplistically imagined that Wilfred Owen adopted a near-pacifist view by the end of the war – and that his death in the very last days of the conflict was a tragic accident. But it seems the truth is more tortured and complex.
Owen became a microcosm of the broader madness that raged around him, the insanity unleashed in August 1914. He appears to have developed a death wish, shedding his broader humanitarian values.
Here’s an account extracted from Chapter 9 of Minds at War: Wilfred Owen’s psychological journey:
By April 1918 he had taken another crucial decision. He had decided to turn his back on life. Talking to his brother whilst home on leave he said that he wanted to return to the front line. “I know I shall be killed. But it’s the only place I can make my protest from.”
In July, encouraged by Robert Ross (best known as a friend and supporter of Oscar Wilde) and the poet, Osbert Sitwell, Owen began to plan a volume of his poems. For it he wrotea his first quick, half-thought-out draft of a preface. Some idea of his thoughts about his role may be gleaned from this.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.
On 26th August he was declared fit for front line action and instructed to embark for France. He wrote to Sassoon, “Everything is clear now; and I am in hasty retreat towards the Front.” Retreat from life, perhaps, or from himself.
Owen rejoined the Manchesters at la Neuville near Amiens on 15th September. As his company waited to go into the front line his fear was beginning to show. He wrote to Sassoon, pathetically blaming him for his predicament.
‘You said it would be a good thing for my poetry if I went back. That is my consolation for feeling a fool.
This is what the shells scream at me every time: “Haven’t you got the wits to keep out of this?”’
Late afternoon on 1st October, and on through the night, the 96th Brigade of the Manchesters went into action near the villages of Joncourt and Sequehart, six miles north of St Quentin. There was “savage hand- to-hand fighting.” At first the Germans were driven back, but they made repeated counter-attacks. Owen threw himself into his task. He wrote to his mother,
I lost all my earthly faculties, and I fought like an angel . . . I captured a German Machine Gun and scores of prisoners . . . I only shot one man with my revolver . . . My nerves are in perfect order.
The psychological change in Owen’s personality was now definitely confirmed in action. Before this time we do not know what attempts, if any, he made to kill the enemy. His identification with soldiers and the soldiers’ role, and his abandonment of his Christian principles, was now complete. Showing his habitual concern for his mother’s feelings he implied that he had killed only one man, but the citation accompanying the Military Cross which he was awarded for his actions that night make it clear that he used the machine gun to kill a large number of men. “He personally manipulated a captured machine gun in an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallantly.”
He now rationalised his motives. In part, he was thinking as a soldier. Forgetting that he had been ordered there, he wrote,
“I came out in order to help these boys – directly by leading them as well as an officer can …”
and then he added an idea which had long been with him, seeing himself once again as an outsider to the soldier’s role,
“indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak as well as a pleader can.”
By killing men he crossed a moral divide between the good and the damned, and in so doing, surrendered his personality to the moral-numbness of front-line soldiers. The real Wilfred Owen no longer existed. The Wilfred Owen who entered the war was dead. His behaviour was no longer the expression of his own will: he was part of a fighting brotherhood, a killing machine. He was impervious to fear, had no sensitivity. He had no self-regard, no self-respect – no self to lose.
From now on his behaviour could be totally reckless being sufficiently rewarded by surges of adrenalin and a sense of heart-warming camaraderie. He wrote to his mother again on 8th October telling her this story of the aftermath of the battle when his company was still surrounded by the enemy.
The letter concluded, “I scrambled out myself and felt an exhilaration in baffling the Machine Guns by quick bounds from cover to cover. After the shells we had been through, and the gas, bullets were like the gentle rain from heaven … Must write now to hosts of parents of Missing, etc . . .”
Writing of the battle to Sassoon on 10th October he said, “I cannot say I suffered anything; having let my brain grow dull . . . My senses are charred.”
Owen knew that the war was nearing its end. The Germans were in full retreat. The British soldiers were welcomed with joyful gratitude by the French, and he was really enjoying himself being part of a band of soldiers. In his last letter to his mother, written on 31st October, he describes the maty atmosphere in his billets, “The Smoky Cellar of Forester’s House.” Conditions were so cramped that he could hardly write for pokes, nudges and jolts. The room was dense with smoke. His cook was chopping wood and an old soldier peeled potatoes and dropped them in a pot splashing Owen’s hand as he did so. It was a scene of perfect soldierly brotherhood, and Owen remarks on his lack of sensitivity to danger.
“It is a great life. I am more oblivious than alas! yourself, dear Mother, of the ghastly glimmering of the guns outside, and the hollow crashing of the shells. . . Of this I am certain: you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here.
Ever Wilfred x”
His mind was now perfectly prepared for his final action. There were now no crucial military objectives, yet the crossing of the seventy feet wide Sambre and Oise Canal, just south of the tiny village of Ors was treated as such. The Germans held the east bank, and were well defended with machine guns. At 5.45 on the morning of 4th November, under a hail of machine gun fire, the Royal Engineers attempted to construct an instant bridge out of wire-linked floats so that Owen’s brigade and 15th and 16th Lancashire Fusiliers could cross and destroy or capture the enemy. Group after group of soldiers went forward and were killed or wounded. Wilfred Owen, standing at the water’s edge, was encouraging his men when he was hit and killed.
Seven days later the war was over. Church bells rang throughout the country. As they were ringing in Shrewsbury, Susan and Tom Owen received the telegram announcing their son’s death
