Poetry and the pity of war

Randle Manwaring

'Can there ever be an end to war?' asked John Keegan in his 1997 Reith Lecture and history would seem to answer 'No'. In short, the human race, whilst progressing in all kinds of scientific fields, remains a poor king over its own nature for, advancing in a few hundred years from cannon balls to the hydrogen bomb, it has not found adequate ways of preventing mutual annihilation. And alongside the enormous strides of human inventiveness must be placed the fact that an Oxford don of the twentieth century is no cleverer than, say, Aristotle, who lived over 2000 years ago. Although present weapons of destruction are too frightening to contemplate and there are, therefore, some inbuilt safeguards against a third world war, humanity wistfully looks forward, in some way, to a time when 'nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more' (Micah Ch. 4 verse 3).

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), in all probability the poet who most developed his art out of war, said in the preface to his Poems: 'The subject of it is War, and the Pity of War.' We think we know what he had in mind - the futility, inevitability and the wretchedness of mutual slaughter. General Sherman (1820-1891), knowing nothing of tanks, gas or aerial bombardment, once told the Michigan Military Academy 'War is hell'. He might well have been a contemporary of Owen but he was, as we know, a Federal General in the American Civil War and fought only with bullets and guns. Robert Burns summed it all up in his great lines:

Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn!

But he might have written of millions rather than thousands, for that has become the pattern of the twentieth century, covering the two world wars which engulfed almost all the Nations of the earth in one way or another. Even the somewhat restricted war of the 1980s, between Iran and Iraq, is reputed to have cost each nation a million dead.

War has been the subject of poetry since earliest times. Either the armies about to engage in conflict have been exhorted by their commanders to exploits of valour and to victory or else the celebrations of triumph have been led in poem, song and dance. On this point, the genius of William Shakespeare will suffice. Henry V speaks before Harfleur in quite blood curdling tones:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead! In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favoure'd rage;

The English camped in Picardy (a place to become more famous as a battlefield in the First World War) and then at Agincourt (1415), the scene of one of the most important battles in history. Interestingly enough, the English won a decisive victory at Agincourt due to the outstanding skill of their archers and lost only 1,600 men, whilst the French lost 6,000. King Henry's speech in the English camp goes down in poetry as amongst the finest expressions of patriotism ever uttered:

This day is called the feast of Crispian: He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd, And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall live this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say, 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian'.

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition: And gentlemen in England, now a-bed Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

The dramatisation of the King's leadership on the battlefield is immensely moving but strong patriotism is, we see, the only discernible clarion call. War was then mostly heroics, hand-to-hand combat and arrows swishing through the air. According to Shakespeare, Richard the Third was equally compelling in his exhortation before his fatal fall at Bosworth (1485).

Fight, gentlemen of England fight! bold yeomen! Draw, archers, draw your arrows to the head! Spur your proud horses hard, and ride in blood; Amaze the welkin with your broken staves!

But soon his enemy Richmond could boast 'the bloody dog is dead'.

Battles were often celebrated in poetry, long after the event, for example The Battle of Ai, by Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) and Lament for Flodden by J. Elliott (1727-1805), but the Americans must take the prize for celebratory verse and flag waving. Jonathan Sewall (1748-1808) wrote in War and Washington:

Vain Britons, boast no longer with proud indignity, By land your conquering legions, your matchless strength at sea, Since we, your braver sons incensed, our swords have girded on, Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza for war and Washington.

And it would be difficult, for rousing patriotism, to match The Star-Spangled Banner by Francis Scott Key (1779-1843):

And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave!

One of the most charming, light-hearted poems on going to war came from the Cavalier poet of the Civil War, Richard Lovelace (1618-1656). To Lucasta, Going to the Wars:

Tell me not (Sweet), I am unkind, That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast, and quiet mind To war and arms I fly.

True; a new mistress now I chase, The first foe in the field; And with a stronger faith embrace A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such, As thou too shalt adore; I could not love thee (Dear), so much, Lov'd I not honour more.

Probably this is considerably tongue-in-cheek, but one cannot help comparing these noble sentiments with the rougher ones of Tommy Adkins singing in 1914-18 about A Long Way to Tipperary etc.

However, pride of place for rousing nationalistic songs must go to Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) with her Battle Hymn of the American Republic (a great favourite of Winston Churchill) which combines a strong patriotism with a Godward reckoning:

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before his Judgement-seat: O, be swift, my soul to answer him! be jubilant my feet! Our God is marching on.

Somewhat wordy, as was his style, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) posed the immortal question:

Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he That every man in arms should wish to be?

The question remained unanswered through both World Wars, for the enigma of killing and being killed puzzled all thinking men in successive battles. Wordsworth, for all his detachment from the realities of war, must have felt the threat of a Napoleonic invasion and have rejoiced at the victory of Wellington at Waterloo (1815), also possibly hearing of the carnage enacted and maybe news reached him of the loss of nearly 400,000 Frenchmen retreating from Moscow in a brutal Russian winter.

Lord Byron (1788-1824) somewhat foreshadowed the feeling of Sassoon and Owen in the First World War when he wrote of the Battle of Waterloo:

Last noon beheld them full of lusty life, Last eve in Beauty's circle, proudly gay, The midnight brought the signal sound of strife, The morn the marshalling in arms, - the day Battle's magnificently stem array! The thunder clouds close o'er it, which when rent The earth is cover'd thick with other clay, Which her own clay shall cover, heap'd and pent, Rider and horse, - friend, foe in one red burial blent.

Wellington thought his army of 23,900 British troops, 'the worst equipped army with the worst staff ever brought together', yet the victory was significant, out of all proportion to the numbers involved and the battle represented the end of one age and the beginning of another. Europe was rid of a fearsome dictator but others were to arise, with a terrible inevitability. 'No more French revolution' was to be echoed in 1918 by the cry of 'no more Prussian militarism'. Wellington, the Iron Duke, had dissolved in tears when he realised the human butchery which had been suffered by the French at Waterloo. Byron also provided some stirring lines entitled Napoleon's Farewell:

Farewell to the land where the gloom of my Glory Arose and o'er shadow'd the earth with her name -

The 'ogre of Corsica' as he was called, took comfort in the fact, as many warriors did in other wars, that -

The violet still grows in the depth of thy valleys.

Much poetry of the age of chivalry tolerated the crudeness of killing, if put in fictitious knightly terms - for instance, in Sir Galahad by Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) -

My good blade carves the casques of men, My tough lance thrusteth sure, My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure.

This is not quite so personal as some of the more graphic descriptions of death in the World Wars but arrogant enough to be distasteful to modern men. However, the spirit of war shows itself in different guises and the self-sacrifice to a righteous cause is very well written into Lord Macaulay's (1800-1859) Epitaph on a Jacobite:

To my true King I offer'd free from stain Courage and faith; vain faith and courage vain. For him I threw lands, honours, wealth away, And one dear hope, that was more prized than they.

Lost causes are favourite themes for war poetry and that of The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson is a fine example of lyric and movement telling the story of glorious death at Balaclava in the Crimean War (1853-56). Orders were misunderstood and the Light Cavalry began an impossible task of charging the Russian Army. Of the 673 officers and men in the Brigade, 247 were killed or wounded. 475 horses perished.

All in the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.

The unquestioning attitude of soldiers under orders is brought out forcefully:

'Forward the Light Brigade!' Was there a man dismay'd? Not tho' the soldier knew Some one had blunder'd:

Although its lyricism is now dated, there is hardly anything more stirring in war poetry than Tennyson's descriptive verse:

They that had fought so well Came thro' the jaws of Death Back from the mouth of Hell, All that was left of them, Left of six hundred.

Who could have foreseen that, only sixty years after the Battle of Balaclava, the numbers involved and of those killed and wounded in battle would have risen by such gigantic proportions. Mass slaughter was, in fact, just round the corner. Furthermore, the heroics of war were always accepted as part of the soldier's lot - witness this report on the Peninsular War (180814):

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, As his corpse to the rampart we hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot O'er the grave where our hero we buried.

(The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna - Charles Wolfe)

Heroes were not quite so stereotyped in later wars - officers and other ranks had more of an equal chance - and it became difficult, as often as not, to pick out your heroes in a holocaust.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, relatively minor skirmishes disturbed the peace of Empire and pure patriotism was still running high. Henry Newbolt (1862-1938), brilliantly representative of the public school patriot, wrote superbly in He fell Among Thieves of a young captive to be killed at dawn by Afghan tribesmen.

'Blood for our blood', they said

and the final verse:

'O glorious Life, who dwellest in earth and sun, I have lived, I praise and adore thee'. A sword swept. Over the pass the voices one by one Faded, and the hill slept.

After the long Victorian summer, came its twilight and a rather more prolonged and serious conflict, that in South Africa, known as the Boer Wars (1880-81 and, more seriously 1899-1902), the old Queen having died in 1901. 20,000 Boer women and children, it was reckoned, died in concentration camps, British troops having devastated the countryside in a terrible process.

Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley were all besieged and Banjo Paterson (1864-1941), the Australian poet, famous as the author of Waltzing Matilda, wrote a celebratory ballad, The Relief of Kimberley:

And French rode into Kimberley: the people cheered amain; The women came with tear-stained eyes to kiss his bridle-rein; The starving children lined the streets to raise a feeble cheer; The bells rang out a joyous peal to say, Relief is here!

The Boer war brought home to people in Britain something of the strain of governing the Empire - gunboats were not always successful in quelling the natives and South Africa seemed very far away, further even than Khartoum where General Gordon had died in 1885 at the hands of an Islamic messianic leader. But the blind patriotism generated by the distant South African war can be instanced by this music-hall song of the time:

We'll take the lion's muzzle off And let him have a go! Whisper to him Majuba Hill, And at his chain he'll pull! There's only room for one out there, And - that's - John Bull!

(In 1881 the Boers had won a victory at Majuba Hill).

Another song declared with utter abandon:

We don't know if the quarrel's right or wrong And hang it, we don't care!!

One cannot help wondering whether, in spite of the support given by the rest of the Empire to the cause, the Boer War was the beginning of the end of Imperial Power. Had it outlived its usefulness.9 The rest of Europe, jealous of British acquisitions in Africa, watched with interest. Germany, France, Holland and Portugal all had ambitions to annexe the lands of Africa. Meanwhile, disease seemed to cause more deaths than bullets and (as in 1914-1918) the people at home became sick of the war which from 1900 dragged on, guerrilla style.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), who turned to publishing his poems after the critics had rejected his novels, wrote one of the simplest and most moving of all war poems in Drummer Hodge, which tells us much of the intrinsic tragedy and futility of war, pictured in the helplessness of a drummer boy killed in the Boer War.

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest Uncoffined - just as found: His landmark is a kopje-crest That breaks the veldt around; And foreign constellations West Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew - Fresh from his Wessex home - The meaning of the broad Karoo, The Bush, the dusty loam, And why uprose to nightly view Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain Will Hodge for ever be; His homely Northern breast and brain Grow up a Southern tree And strange-eyed constellations reign His stars eternally.

I quote this poem in full for its pathos. Hardy, more than most, wrote of the harsh malignancy of fate and in this poem he captured the helplessness and hopelessness of those caught up in war - especially a boy. In particular and foreshadowing the poetry of World War I, he worked on the theme that those who die on the battlefields of the worlds remember, with due poignancy, the homes from which they come and the countryside they have left behind, combined with a knowledge that, in death, they will become part of the very soil they love. Furthermore, in this poem we see the tragic anonymity of a boy (surname only) thrown into some quickly dug pit for dead bodies.

It seems to me that Thomas Hardy, master of melancholy, in all his poetry abandoned the cosy heroism of Waterloo, Balaclava, and the Empire for the realism of the fighting man and his underlying hatred of war.

Hardy's major war-poem, The Dynasts, published between 1904 and 1908, dealt with Napoleon, his threat to Britain and his strutting walk across the stage of history. Throughout, Hardy related these great events, as he did in Drummer Hodge, to his rustic Wessex friends and over all he saw the Immanent Will, as he called it, the Spirit of the Pities and the Spirit of the Years. These were, in another sense, to quote W. B. Yeats, the 'great black oxen' which, as he saw it, God the herdsman was goading on behind. Hardy was, in simple terms, a gloomy fatalist and the sense of this comes through in one of his most anthologised poems written soon after the outbreak of the First World War: In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'.

Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass; yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by: War's annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.

Hardy took his title from the Old Testament (Jeremiah Chapter 51, Verse 20) - 'I will break in pieces the nations.'

During the quiet Edwardian evening before the First World War (Edward VII died in 1910), Britain held sway over half the globe, class divisions were as marked as ever but a European conflict seemed to the average man a remote possibility. He heard the warning of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) against national pride but took little notice when the old Queen was almost deified in Jubilee and Kipling wrote his Recessional.

God of our fathers, known of old Lord of our far-flung battle-line, Beneath whose awful Hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget!

There was no stauncher patriot than Kipling but he could see, more clearly than most, the danger of being drunk with power and, although he was much misunderstood, being labelled an Imperialist or a Jingoist, he exercised some restraint on the pre-war world. However, the spirit of the times was one of optimism and ease, heroism and patriotism, exemplified in The Dying Patriot by James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) who died, not as a result of the war but of tuberculosis in a Swiss sanatorium.

Sleep not my country: though night is here, afar Your children of the morning are clamorous for war; Fire in the night, O dreams!

Though she send you as she sent you, long ago South to desert, east to ocean, west to snow,

West of these out to seas colder than the Hebrides I must go Where the fleet of stars is anchored and the young Star-captains glow.

In the summer of 1914, Europe stood on the brink of calamity. The long night of war then fell upon civilisation, dragging down a way of life and placing it beyond recall. But out of the tragedy which ended exactly eighty years ago, came a poetry which said it all - the pity, the futility and the sacrifice of a whole generation. But what, one may ask, were the root causes of this suicidal, multi-national stupidity and what happened to the famed British spirit of progress in thought and deed?

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