Today of course is Remembrance Sunday, and Oxford’s annual service thankfully passed off well. The approach of the occasion made me think of the poetry written by participants in the First World War, taught in all schools and sold in most bookshops, but which I hadn’t read since sixth form. It seemed appropriate yesterday to buy a new anthology of war poetry.
Why do we still read the poetry of conflict, especially of the First World War, and why is it still taught in our schools? After all, today the contents of any anthology of war poetry must appear variously imperialist bombast, grim satire or really pretty horrible. A poem like Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est is genuinely difficult to read, and that of course is a measure of its effectiveness. But why is it still read?
Not, I think, to warn ourselves of the dangers of repeating the mistakes of the past – real as they are. In the Middle Ages people were encouraged to read or listen to gruesome stories to remind them of the perils of sin, and it never worked.
In considering what lies at the heart of war poetry, and of its continued appeal, let us begin with an example – not a well-known example, but an anonymous soldiers’ song of the trenches. It starts as a comic sketch of a drunken NCO:
If you want to find the Sergeant,
I know where he is, I know where he is,
I know where he is.
If you want to find the Sergeant,
I know where he is –
He’s lying on the Canteen floor.
I’ve seen him, I’ve seen him,
Lying on the canteen floor.
If you want to find the old Battalion,
I know where they are, I know where they are,
I know where they are.
If you want to find the old Batallion,
I know where they are -
They’re hanging on the old barbed wire.
I’ve seen ‘em, I’ve seen ‘em,
Hanging on the old barbed wire.
This is effective – and as effective as any war poem I know – because it brings to us with an almost physical shock that the people who fought and died in that war were people like us – neither myriad victims nor tragic heroes, but people who like a laugh and one or two pints, and would probably have watched Never Mind The Buzzcocks had it been invented.
Perhaps war poetry is still read because it helps us, not to understand war, but to understand that the people involved in it really are people. When confronted by a statistic such as the number of people killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, or in Bosnia, Congo or Iraq, or in any conflict, it is almost impossible to understand, even if you relate it to the population of your home town.
Proportionately to population, more people were killed in one day at Towton in the fifteenth century than on the bloodiest day of the Somme, but this is meaningless, because tragedy is not proportionate to population. Tragedy is not statistical but individual, and collective because individual. Capitalism, with greater propulation and greater resources, found ways of killing more people, and in its mechanised slaughter it brought a new kind of horror into the world. Tragedy has no meaning apart from individual human beings.
So when (for example) Richard Aldington tells us about looking at the “untroubled blue” of the sky after four days’ murderous bombardment, we are moved because this is one human being’s view of a horrible, miserable, senseless war – this is someone like us looking at it from inside and recording his impressiopns. The indescribable is described, the inhuman humanised. Humanity is asserted in the face of tragedy, it emerges from the chaos, and only by a return of humanity can war ever be ended. Thus all war poetry, however horrible, contains a message of home. This, I believe, is why we still read it.
W. B. Yeats, a great poet who said a number of silly things in the course of his life, thought that “psssive suffering was not a fit subject for poetry”. But I don’t think he understood. The subject is not “passive suffering”, but human beings – those who suffer, those who wrote then and those who read now. For Wilfred Owen “the Poetry was in the Pity”, and pity is a human emotion. It connects one human being to another and thus promotes humanity, because this is what humanity is.
“Humanity is a social animal”, both politically and, if you will pardon nthe word, spiritually, and the human race is a collective composed of individuals in which both individual and collective are essential and inseparable. Perhaps by promoting humanity, we really can put an end to war. Let us hope so – and let us work for it. Making war poetry better known is not a bad place to start.
