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Ancient and Unteachable, abide—abide the Trumpets!
Once again the Trumpets, for the shuddering ground-swell brings
Clamour over ocean of the harsh, pursuing Trumpets—
Trumpets of the Vanguard that have sworn no truce with Kings!
RUDYARD KIPLING, The Old Issue
A century of myth-making has left us with a one-sided vision of the Great War. It often seems a slow-motion horror story, an opera of mud and blood, performed to a musical score one part “Land of Hope and Glory,” one part “Mademoiselle from Armentières.”
In fact, the war was less an opera than an opera house, even a score of them, with only a few of their stages presenting The Trenches of Flanders. Others played epics of love, sacrifice, crime, courage, beauty, horror, and cowardice. It was a culture, an industry; in the phrase of social historian John Brophy, “an enormous institution, with the prestige of a barbaric religion.”
Just as poppies bloomed in Flanders earth, plowed by artillery and fertilized with blood, art fed on war. Wilfred Owen tried to distance himself from the realization that his best work flowed from carnage. “I am not concerned with poetry,” he wrote stiffly. “My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.”
Not all poets agreed. Though Owen’s work and that of Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, and a few others earned them the label “the war poets,” they were only a handful of those who wrote about the war, and a minority in doing so negatively. Magazines and newspapers of the time were awash with belligerent and patriotic doggerel celebrating the rightness of the conflict and the nobility of sacrifice—or rather Sacrifice, since the ennobling by capitalization of such concepts as Death and Honor runs through the rhetoric of the period like the murmur of an organ voluntary at a funeral. Sheep May Safely Graze.
Mediocrity was relieved by an occasional gifted voice. One of these belonged to the American Alan Seeger. His best-known poem, “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” though not immune from high seriousness, is sincerely felt. While conceding that he’d prefer to die in comfort, “deep pillowed in silk and scented down,” the poet accepts that Duty may dictate otherwise.
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Seeger kept his rendezvous in 1916, dying in action with the French Foreign Legion.
In one of the most quoted of all war poems, “In Flanders Fields,” a Canadian doctor, John McCrea, somewhat vaguely related the poppies of Flanders to a need to honor the dead by fighting on.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Tenuous or not, the connection of the poppy and World War I proved durable. We still buy and wear paper poppies to signify remembrance.
Of all these affirmative voices, the finest belonged to Rupert Brooke. A literary comet, effortlessly talented, Brooke was also physically alluring in the willowy and androgynous way that is archetypically English; fellow poet W. B. Yeats called him “the handsomest young man in England.” Brooke found the prospect of war positively elating. To him, it
caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping.
Rupert Brooke
Had he experienced combat, he might have changed his mind, but he became one of the thirty million who never had the chance. Though he did die in uniform, it wasn’t in the trenches but on a troop ship off the Greek island of Skyros, and not from a bullet but from an infected mosquito bite. (In listing war’s aspects, one shouldn’t neglect farce.)
If there was a joke, however, it wasn’t on Brooke. The monument to the war poets in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, which he shares with Owen, Sassoon, Robert Graves, and a few other veterans, may bear Owen’s quote about the poetry being in the pity, but it was Brooke’s work that sold in the millions, continued to do so for decades after his death, and is today better known than that of his compatriots.
How much more consoling than the bitterness of Owen was Brooke’s “The Soldier”:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.
His sentiments were echoed by Philip Gibbs, a British novelist who became a war correspondent. Like many, Gibbs saw war as a cure-all: in his case a corrective to the pettiness of party politics. Of the week hostilities began, he noted approvingly that “the leaders of the nation abandoned their feuds. Their blood thrilled to old sentiments and old traditions which had seemed to belong to the lumber-room of history, with the moth-eaten garments of their ancestors.”
Britain’s poet laureate of the day, Robert Bridges, agreed. “Britons have ever fought well for their country, and their country’s Cause is the high Cause of Freedom and Honour. We can therefore be happy in our sorrows, happy even in the death of our beloved who fall in the fight; for they die nobly, as heroes and saints die, with hearts and hands unstained by hatred or wrong.”
Gibbs, Bridges, and Brooke could speak of war in abstractions—Freedom and Honor—because they didn’t know its reality. If the public visualized war, it was the campaigns in Africa against the Boers and Zulus: militarily speaking, walks in the park. At Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, 25,000 British and Egyptian troops, each man armed with a modern rifle, faced 52,000 spear-carrying, sword-waving warriors under their fanatical leader the Mahdi. The Sudanese lost 10,000 killed, the British 47.
No war had been fought on European soil since the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870–1871. During the subsequent forty years at peace, professional armies had shrunk. Troops were aging and sketchily trained, their equipment out of date, duties reduced to ceremonial appearances, “maneuvers,” or keeping order during riots and natural disasters.
The battles between France and Prussia had been as formal as those between toy soldiers on a nursery floor. War was thought of as a show. During the American Civil War, the citizens of Washington streamed out to watch General George McClellan defend the city. In 1854, British commanders and their guests ate a picnic on a hillside as they watched the Light Brigade charge the Russian guns at Balaclava.
Young men yearned for war as a chance to prove their courage. American writer Malcolm Cowley, who served as an ambulance and explosives driver in France, believed the risk of death sharpened the senses and stimulated creativity.
The war created in young men a thirst for abstract danger, not suffered for a cause but courted for itself; if later they believed in the cause, it was partly in recognition of the danger it conferred on them. Danger was a relief from boredom; a stimulus to the emotions, a color mixed with all others to make them brighter.
There were moments in France when the senses were immeasurably sharpened by the thought of dying next day, or possibly next week. The trees were green, not like ordinary trees, but like trees in the still moment before a hurricane; the sky was a special and ineffable blue; the grass smelled of life itself; the image of death at twenty, the image of love, mingled together into a keen, precarious delight. Danger made it possible to write once more about love, adventure, death.
Once Douglas Haig predicted in August 1914 that the Allies would defeat Germany in a matter of months, boys rushed to volunteer, concerned the war would end before they’d had their adventure. All over the world, cuirassiers, uhlans, dragoons, and light horsemen brushed off their uniforms and groomed their horses. They could already see themselves thundering toward the enemy, sabers leveled, helmet plumes flying, silver breastplates gleaming.
The illusion of heroism
But it’s where the capitalization ends—where War becomes just war and Death simply death; where this amateur war, a war of imagination and expectation, the ice cream war, intersects with the reality of mustard gas and the machine gun—that one glimpses its transformative effects.
Nowhere was this more true than in Paris.