Dread anniversary

Amidst all the centenary anniversaries for the First World War, 4 November is one of the more dismal. And one not to be missed.

Picture a young man choosing to join the British army in 1915. In December 1916, as a second lieutenant, he goes with his men to France to experience both the slaughter of action and the sapping horror of the conditions. He suffers concussion by falling into a shell hole; later, he’s blown up by a mortar and spends several days hiding in a hole with the dead body of a friend a few feet away.

He wrote to his mother, ‘for twelve days I did not wash my face, nor take off my boots, nor sleep a deep sleep. For twelve days we lay in holes where at any moment a shell might put us out.’

In the summer of 1917, he was diagnosed with shell shock and sent for treatment to Edinburgh. There he met one of the outstanding war poets, Siegfried Sassoon. Was it the meeting with Sassoon or some other cause that turned him, without warning, into one of the finest poets in the English language, and certainly the greatest composer of war poems? For thirteen months, he wrote and wrote, always basing himself on the horrors he met himself: a man gassed, with ‘white eyes writhing in his face’; a sentry blown by a shell from a ladder, crying ‘oh sir, my eyes – I'm blind – I'm blind, I'm blind!’; the search in no-man's land for a man overcome by exhaustion, with its bleak view of the outcome of war, ‘shame of success, and sorrow of defeats’.

Sassoon returned to the front but a serious wound brought him back to England on permanent sick leave. His younger friend may have felt that this put him under an obligation to rejoin the fighting, because a poet should be there to continue chronicling the war – ‘I shall be better able to cry my outcry, playing my part’. By now, he was convinced the war was something that had to be stopped – ‘nations trek from progress’. No one was pressuring him to go and he might have remained in England for the rest of the war. Sassoon tried to dissuade him from going back and even threatened to come himself and wound him in the leg to prevent it. But that only meant that he went without telling his friend.

He was back in the fighting in July 1918. In October, he distinguished himself so conspicuously that he was awarded the Military Cross. The citation read:

For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in the attack on the Fonsomme Line on October 1st/2nd, 1918. On the company commander becoming a casualty, he assumed command and showed fine leadership and resisted a heavy counter-attack. He personally manipulated a captured enemy machine gun from an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallantly.

To him, this was a validation of his chosen role: he was a soldier as well as a poet and his denunciations of the war were no reflection of unwillingness to expose himself to danger.

The Sambre-Oise canal in November 1918

Then came 4 November. He led a raiding party crossing the Sambre-Oise canal. It came under heavy fire and, with many of the party, he too was killed.

He’d been preparing an edition of his poems for publication, and had begun to draft a preface. In it, he urged his reader not to mistake his intention:

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

November the fourth. One week before the Armistice that ended the war. One week too soon to save one of the most remarkable poets the English language has produced: Wilfred Owen.

A young man heading to war. And becoming a poet

Sassoon found Strange Meetings Owen’s best poem. Certainly, it’s among my favourites. It ends:

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now...