WORLD WAR I POETRY At the going down

WORLD WAR I POETRY “At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them. ” (Binyon 15 -16) “For the Fallen”

Popularity • Jon Mc. Crae’s poem “In Flanders Fields” became the inspiration for the British Legion’s annual poppy campaign • Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” one of best known poems in English- choice of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, for inclusion in The Big Book of Little Poems

“the war that was Great” Vernon Scannell • First major war for British troops for a hundred years • On such a huge and mechanized scale that very few communities or even families were untouched • Conscription- introduced in Britain for the first time in 1916, but even before that tens of thousands had enlisted • Professional soldiers vastly outnumbered by volunteers and conscripts

• Officer class received education founded on the classics and informed by the idealism of Victorian and Edwardian culture • Universal education meant private soldiers were, for the first time, literate and acquainted with the English literary tradition

• Came at a great time of great social, political and cultural change • Birth of movements in the arts (modernism) • Industrial and political unrest throughout Europe

World War I was the catalyst for more major military technological innovations than any other war in history. • • Aircraft and air warfare The submarine The tank Poison gas Machine gun Artillery and high explosives Electronic communications (field telephones)

• During the war the term “soldier-poet” was “almost as familiar as a ration card” (Edmund Blunden) • In the television series Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) Lord Flasheart complains, “I’m sick of this damn war- the blood, the noise, the endless poetry. ”

Popularity of Poetry THEN • Popular in ways it’s hard to appreciate today • Newspapers regularly printed new poems and volumes of verse also did well • In 1914 a Georgian Poetry anthology

Trench Warfare • The middle part of the war, 1916 and 1917, was dominated by continued trench warfare in both the east and the west. Soldiers fought from dug-in positions, striking at each other with machine guns, heavy artillery, and chemical weapons. Though soldiers died by the millions in brutal conditions, neither side had any substantive success or gained any advantage. • Threat of illness from decomposing bodies and diseases bred in mud

Significance of WW 1 The First World War runs through the British modern -day psyche like no other conflict. On Remembrance Day Sunday thoughts (of those who have not fought) turn to the fields in Flanders and the slaughter of the Somme and Passchendaele more readily than Dunkirk, El Alamein, or Arnhem (unless, of course, the date is an anniversary of a specific battle). It has been described as Britain's 'Vietnam', where the true horror of War touched everyone and everything in the country, breaking through the class barrier and irreversibly altering the social structure of the nation. It also closely parallels Vietnam as it represents an overwhelming feeling of futility, in that so many lives were wasted for such little gain. Unlike the Second World War, which more easily falls into the 'just war' definition of right versus wrong, the First World War appears as a conflict with aims that were quickly lost, degenerating to a war of attrition in unbelievable conditions.

Moreover, the War was dehumanizing. It brought home how quickly and easily mankind could be reduced to a state lower than animals. Pat Barker, in her novel Regeneration (1992), reflects on the War's terrible reversal of expectations: "The Great Adventure. They'd been mobilized into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure (the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys) consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. "

Themes of WW 1 Poetry • • Patriotism Heroism War and Nature Visions and Dreams

• Brooke's entire reputation as a war poet rests on only 5 "war sonnets. “ • Brooke's war experience consisted of one day of limited military action with the Hood Battalion during the evacuation of Antwerp. • Consequently, his "war sonnets" swell with naive sentiments of the most general kind on themes of maturity, purpose and romantic death – the kind of sentiments held by many (but not all) young Englishmen at the outbreak of the war. • Died of blood poisoning from a mosquito bite while en route to Gallipoli with the Navy Rupert Brooke

Brooke's poetry gives us a glimpse of a golden era in England just before the First World War. To be more precise, it was a golden time only for the upper classes, who enjoyed the fruits of Britain's imperial dominance: public school education, guaranteed employment (if they desired it) and access to the rich and powerful members of society. • The gap between rich and poor was wide during this period, and unrest was beginning to grow among the lower classes. • The war gave a huge shock to the system and, despite the terrible human cost, led eventually to a more equal society, not least because the poorer classes were largely the ones dying in the trenches as a result of orders issued by untrained, aristocratic generals living miles behind the lines. •

The Soldier 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. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. Rupert Brooke

Wilfred Owen • Wilfred Owen was 21 when the war broke out. Although he had failed to win a scholarship to university, he was very intelligent and cultured. • Owen was not horrified or elated by the outbreak of war, although during 1914, he became more aware of the human sacrifice involved and was filled with confusion.

• In the second week of January, one of the worst in memory, he led his platoon into the Battle of the Somme. He wrote to his mother every week and described what he had been through: "Those fifty hours were the agony of my happy life. . . I nearly broke down and let myself drown in the water that was now rising slowly above my knees. In the Platoon on my left, the sentries over the dug-out were blown to nothing".

• In the middle of March, Owen fell through a shell-hole into a cellar and was trapped in the dark for three days, suffering from nausea and concussion. He spent a fortnight in hospital before rejoining his battalion and becoming involved in fierce fighting. At one stage he was blown out of the trench in which he was taking cover from an artillery bombardment which had already dismembered an officer in the neighbouring trench. • He escaped uninjured, but these trials by fire had taken their toll on his mind, and on May 1 st, he was seen by his Commanding Officer to be behaving strangely. He was ordered to report to the Battalion Medical Officer who found him to be shaky and with a confused memory. He was eventually diagnosed as having neurasthenia (shell shock) and was invalided back to England then to Craiglockhart War hospital near Edinburgh.

• Apart from his joining the army, no other event had so much influence over Owen as meeting Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart. Owen read the published poetry of Sassoon for the first time at the hospital. He introduced himself, and so began a close friendship and literary partnership which would create some of the finest poetry of the war. Owen's most famous poems were written from this time until he left the hospital. • Owen relived his most traumatic memories every night through the form of obsessive nightmares. Under Sassoon's direction, he began to write about these memories in poetry. His poems recreated the miserable conditions and constant stress with which the soldiers lived – the mud, rats, barbed wire, lice, fleas, corpses, blood and constant shelling. He also gave graphic descriptions of the effects of poison gas.

• In one of his most famous poems “Anthem for Doomed Youth, ” he asked angrily "what passing-bells for these who die as cattle? ", reflecting the fact that the soldiers were simply little more than machine gun fodder, lines of them killed instantly as they went over the top. • Owen wrote for an entire generation of young men killed or horribly wounded in a four year war. In one poem “Disabled, ” he wrote about the thousands of young men who dreamed of glory and triumph and joined the army with all the others in the factory, or on their street, or at a football match, where recruiting drives were often made.

• Owen is the most famous of all the war poets as he succeeded in portraying the reality of the war - the boredom, the helplessness, the horror and above all, the futility of it - without losing his artistic poise, or allowing bitterness to creep into his work. • Wilfred Owen returned to the front in 1918 and was awarded the military cross for bravery for capturing a German machine gun. He never received it as he was killed early on the morning of 4 th November 1918, seven days before the armistice.

Dulce Et Decorum Est Wilfred Owen Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest 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 hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime… Dim, through the misty panes 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, 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 cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Siegfried Sassoon • born in England, in 1886 • educated at Marlborough and Cambridge where he studied both law and history before leaving without taking a degree. • After Cambridge, Sassoon lived the life of a sportsman, hunting, riding point-to-point races and playing cricket until the outbreak of the War. • Although Sassoon wrote poetry before the War he was no more than a minor Georgian poet. • Sassoon enlisted on 2 August 1914, two days before the British declaration of war, and initially joined as a trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry – later Sassoon was commissioned in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers (May 1915). Between November 1915 and April 1917 he served as a second lieutenant in both the First and Second Battalions R. W. F. • On November 1, 1915 Sassoon suffered his first personal loss of the War. His younger brother Hamo was buried at sea after being mortally wounded at Gallipoli. Sassoon subsequently commemorated this with a poem entitled To My Brother. Then on March 18, 1916 second lieutenant David C. 'Tommy' Thomas was killed whilst out with a wiring party.

• These losses upset Sassoon and he became determined to "get his revenge" on the Germans. To this end, he went out on patrol in no-man's-land even when there were no raids planned. Such reckless enthusiasm earned him the nickname "Mad Jack", but he was saved from further folly by a four-week spell at the Army School in Flixecourt. • About a month later, he was involved in a raid on Kiel Trench. His actions in getting his dead and wounded men back to the British trenches earned him a Military Cross, which he received the day before the start of the Battle of the Somme, in July 1916.

• Sassoon participated in the second Battle of the Scarpe where he was wounded in the shoulder. This particular incident started a train of events which culminated in Sassoon's Declaration, for it was whilst on convalescent leave after being wounded that Sassoon talked to several prominent pacifists (including John Middleton Murry and Bertrand Russell). • His Declaration of "wilful defiance" was written during this time, and he returned to the Depot in Liverpool having sent his statement to his Colonel, miserably determined to take whatever punishment was given out. • Fortunately for Sassoon, his friend and fellow Welch Fusilier, Robert Graves, intervened, pulled strings with the authorities and managed to persuade them to have Sassoon medically boarded (or referred), with the result that in July 1917 he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh officially suffering from shell-shock.

• It was at Craiglockhart that Sassoon met the poet Wilfred Owen (also diagnosed with shell-shock). Sassoon's encouragement of Owen's writing has been welldocumented. • Sassoon himself wrote a good deal of poetry whilst at Craiglockhart and the material he wrote at that time later appeared in Counter-Attack and Other Poems. After four months at Craiglockhart, Sassoon was again passed fit for General Service abroad. • He had spent many hours talking to his psychiatrist, Dr. W. H. R. Rivers and eventually realised that his protest had achieved nothing, except to keep him away from his men; his decision to apply for General Service seems to have been based on his perceived responsibilities at the front.

• Sassoon eventually found himself in the Front Line again, near Mercatel. From there he moved to St. Hilaire and the Front Line at St. Floris where his old foolhardiness took over, despite the responsibility of being a Company Commander. Sassoon decided to attack the German trenches opposite them, and he went out with a young Corporal. His actions were paid for with a wound to his head on July 13, 1918, and Sassoon was invalided back to England. That was the end of Sassoon's War. • After a period of convalescence he was placed on indefinite sick leave until after the Armistice, eventually retiring officially from the Army in March 1919.