In 1914 the First World War broke out on a largely innocent world, a world that still associated warfare with glorious cavalry charges and the noble pursuit of heroic ideals. This was the world's first experience of modern mechanised warfare. As the months and years passed, each bringing increasing slaughter and misery, the soldiers became increasingly disillusioned. Many of the strongest protests made against the war were made through the medium of poetry by young men horrified by what they saw. One of these poets was 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, and in the two years before the war began, had taken a post at the Berlitz School in Bordeaux, France, tutoring the children of wealthy families and learning the language and literature of the country.
Wilfred Owen
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. Eventually he returned to England and on 21 October 1915, enlisted in the Artists' Rifles. He spent the next seven and a half months training in Essex and on the 4 June was commissioned into the Manchester Regiment, where he underwent further training before crossing to France on 29 December. 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 1st, 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 and 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. They did not meet for some time as Owen was busy with his doctor, Captain Arthur Brock, who believed that shell shock resulted from broken contact with real life and tried to re-establish that connection by means of "ergotherapy" or workcure. In Owen's case, this took the form of a long poem about Antaeus and Hercules which had been set for him by Brock. He also contributed to, and became editor of, "The Hydra", the hospital magazine.
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 Sasson'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 gave graphic descriptions of the effects of poison gas and said that:
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 (It is a sweet and decorous thing
to die for one's country).
There are many simple poignant accounts of young men dying or dead, such as this one;
Though from his throat
The life-tide leaps
There was no threat
on his lips
But with the bitter blood
And the death-smell
All his life's sweetness bled
Into a smileIn 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.
It was after the football, when he'd drunk a peg
He thought he'd better join...
He asked to join, he didn't have to beg;
Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen yearsOwen 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 4th November 1918, seven days before the armistice.