Letters from Vienna #118
Wilfred Owen
The Futility of War
Futility
“Zero hour was set for 5.45 next morning, Monday 4 November (1918),” Dominic Hibbard tells us. “The two leading Manchester companies, of which Wilfred’s was one, were to assemble well back from the canal to avoid the opening barrage. The shells would fall as dense, deep curtain on the far bank for five minutes, then lift three hundred yards to higher ground in front of La Motte Farm, remaining there for thirty minutes… At the moment of the first lift the companies would dash forward to give covering fire while the bridge was built, and before the allotted half-hour was out they would be over the canal, ready to follow the barrage as it started to creep across the fields…”
“The first part of the plan worked perfectly. The Manchesters gathered in a lane about a quarter of a mile from the canal, Private Roberts keeping close to Wilfred as Jones had done before. As soon as the barrage lifted the two front companies ran forward and lined the bank. Helped by fog, smoke and darkness they had achieved the surprise they wanted, and by the time the enemy was able to put down an answering barrage it fell harmlessly behind them. The pioneers struggled up with the heavy floats, and as each pier was dropped into the water the engineers hooked a length of duckboard into places and began fixing poles from one pier to another to give extra stability…”
“Very soon the defenders on the east bank opened up with ferocious machine gun and trench mortar fire, after a while adding shrapnel and gas…As the bridge grew across the water, the fog began to clear. Thirty of the forty-two engineers became casualties…”
“A sapper named Archibald went out on the bridge to finish it, and other men joined him, but all were hit or gassed.”
“…while helping his men to get some planks across” Wilfred Owen was hit and killed.[1]
Just a few days later, on 11 November 1918, the war ended.
Owen’s Letters Home
On the 4th of October Owens had written to his mother: “The war is nearing to an end…”[2] and four days later: “All one day (after the battle) we could not move from a small trench, though hour by hour the wounded were groaning just outside. Three stretcher-bearers who got up were hit, one after one…”[3]
To Leslie Guston he wrote on the 25th of October: “You must not imagine when you hear we are “resting” that we lie in bed smoking. We work or are on duty always. And last night my dreams were troubled by fairly close shelling. I believe only civilians in the village were killed (Thank God). In this house where I stay, five healthy girls died of fright when our guns shelled the place last fortnight.”[4]
On the 29th of October he penned the following words to his mother: “The civilians here are a wretched, dirty, crawling community, afraid of us, some of them, and no wonder after the shelling we gave them three weeks ago…”
“Did I tell you that five healthy girls died of fright in one night at the last village. The people of England and France who thwarted a peaceable retirement of the enemy from these areas therefore now sacrificing aged French peasants and charming French children to our guns. Shells made by women in Birmingham are at this moment burying little children alive not very far from here.”
“It is rumoured that Austria has really surrendered (an armistice was signed with the Italians on 3 November 1918). The new soldiers cheer when they hear these rumours, but the old ones bite their pipes, and go on cleaning their rifles, unbelieving…”[5]
In his last letter to his mother, on the 31st of October, 1918, he stated: “So thick is the smoke in this cellar that I can hardly see by a candle 12 ins. away, and so thick are the inmates that I can hardly write for pokes, nudges and jolts.”
“On my left the Coy. Commander snores on a bench, other officers repose on wire beds behind one. At my right hand, Kellett, a delightful servant of A Coy in the old days radiates joy and contentment from pink cheeks and baby eyes. He laughs with a signaller to whose left ear is glued the receiver but whose eyes rolling with gaiety show that he is listening with his right ear to a merry corporal, who appears at this distance away (some three feet) nothing but a gleam of white teeth and a wheeze of jokes.”
“Splashing my hand, an old soldier with a walrus moustache peals and drops potatoes into the pot. By him, Keyes, my cook, chops wood; another feeds the smoke with damp wood.”
“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.”
“There is no danger down here, of if any, it will be well over before you read these lines.”
“I hope you are as warm as I am: as serene in your room as I am here, and that you think of me never in bed as resignedly as I think of you always in bed. Of this I am certain you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here.”[6]
It was only after the war that Wilfred Owen became famous as a poet, largely due to the efforts of Siegfried Sassoon, who had inspired and mentored him while both had been recovering in Edinburgh.
The poems Owen are best remembered for could be penned by a Ukrainian today. There is little fundamental difference (other than the absence of gas on the battle-field perhaps) between the trench warfare in the Ukraine today and the trench warfare on the Western Front in 1918. Then, as now, the majority who die in battle are killed by shelling and then, as now, life was nasty, brutal and short (one Ukrainian has said that new recruits last roughly four hours on the front[7]).
Poems
Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, —
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Dulce et Decorum Est
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 gas-shells dropping softly 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.
Futility
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?
[1] pp.364-365 Wilfred Owen, Dominic Hibberd
[2] p.580 Collected Letters, Wilfred Owen
[3] p.581, Ibid
[4] p.589 Ibid
[5] p.590 Ibid
[6] p.591 Ibid