Bitter death

In a letter dated August 1, 1920, one Susan Owen wrote to Rabindranath Tagore: “...my dear eldest son went out to the War for the last time and the day he said goodbye to me — we were looking together across the sun-glorified sea — looking towards France, with breaking hearts — when he, my poet son, said those wonderful words of yours — beginning at ‘When I go from hence, let this be my parting word’ — and when his pocket book came back to me — I found these words written in his dear writing — with your name beneath.” Susan was the mother of Wilfred Owen, now considered one of the finest poets of World War I. 

When he died, in action, on November 4, 1918, Owen was 25 years old. The Armistice was signed a week later. A few months before, he had described an offensive by an infantry unit in his poem, “Spring Offensive”: “…soon they topped the hill, and raced together / Over an open stretch of herb and heather / Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned / With fury against them”. A graphic description follows of the bullets and fire through which the soldiers run. There is no description of victory or defeat — only of those who have survived and those who have not. “The few who rushed in the body to enter hell, / And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames / ...Regained cool peaceful air in wonder— / Why speak they not of comrades that went under?”

BITTER TRUTH: WW I poet Wilfred Owen found no glory in dying for his country

Owen himself had led similar charges and suffered a number of traumatic experiences during the war. During his first stint at the frontlines, after the trench he was stationed in was blown up, he reportedly remained unconscious for days, lying on an embankment amid the bodies of his comrades. Rescued, he was sent back home and admitted to the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. It was here that he met fellow poet-soldier Siegfried Sassoon, whom Owen would later idolise. Sassoon introduced him to a number of other writers and poets, including C K Scott Moncrieff, translator of Marcel Proust. Moncrieff wrote a number of poems dedicated to “Mr W.O.” — but confirming whether Owen reciprocated the overtures is impossible to know. During his lifetime — and for very long afterwards — homosexuality was illegal in the UK.

Sassoon also served on the frontlines in France and was even decorated for his service. In 1918, he described his experience of an onslaught in the poem “Attack”: “Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire. / The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed / With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear, / Men jostle and climb to, meet the bristling fire. / … While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists, / And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, / Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!” Both poets abjured the idealistic vein of contemporary Rupert Brooke, best represented in such lines: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.” Instead, they wrote about the horrible conditions in which the war was being fought: “The awful state of the roads, and the enormous weight carried was too much for scores of men.”

Of the 60-70 poems by Owen that have been collected and published over the past 100 years, the most famous is “Dulce et Decorum Est”. It describes the retreat of a regiment: “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.” The retreating soldiers are suddenly attacked with gas (chemical weapons were freely used in World War I, leading to them being banned after that). While most soldiers manage to put on their gas masks, one doesn’t, and dies. 

In an ardent, anti-war statement, Owen writes: “If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in, / … 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.” The Latin words are from Horace’s Odes, and are usually translated as: “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.” In the trenches of France, however, Owen and his comrades had found nothing sweet — death, they found, was bitter.

The writer’s book of poems Visceral Metropolis was published in 2017 and his novel Ritual is forthcoming this year