As with many of the most popular works of the First World War, this poem was written early in the conflict, before the romanticism of war turned to bitterness and disillusionment for soldiers and civilians alike. The author, Canadian poet, physician, and soldier Lt. Colonel John McRae, died of pneumonia in January 1918 while serving in France. McRae’s poem was used in the United States to increase military enlistment during the last year of the war.
The War to End All Wars?
Lest we forget, today we are commemorating Veteran’s Day. In most other countries, November 11th is widely known as Remembrance Day, the day World War I ended in 1918.
In August 1914, the idea of total war between great industrialized nations arrived with a vengeance. After one thousand, five hundred and fifty-one days of intense fighting and nine million dead and many more wounded or missing, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year 1918, the guns of war would finally fall silent.
World War I had come to an end but not before an entire generation of European men had been lost. It was a brutal and destructive war — one whose global reverberations are felt even to this day. Two decades later on September 1, 1939, the armed forces of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany invaded Poland with overwhelming force, lightning speed, and unprecedented ferocity. World War II had begun and the term "Blitzkrieg" would enter our vocabulary along with all the negative connotations it implied.
Given that it is a complex topic, this diary is not a comprehensive history of World War I. It only explores some of the themes from that senseless war and the response of a few soldier-poets directly affected by it. I know this is a long diary, but I hope it’s worth your time.
I first posted a version of this diary on November 11, 2012.
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 tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped 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.
The haunting music accompanying Owen’s classic poem in the above video is "Adagio in G Minor" by 18th century Italian composer Tomaso Albioni. It is one of the best videos I have ever seen. Here is another animated video of Owen’s poem.
On the day the war ended on November 11, 1918, the sound of church bells in Shrewsbury, England signaled the coming of the long-awaited peace. At the home of Wilfred Owen’s parents, the doorbell rang and a telegram informed them that their son had been killed. Only a few days earlier, he was caught in a German machine gun attack and killed in action on November 4, 1918.
Owen eventually came to be revered as one of the great British poets of World War I. In “Dulce Et Decorum Est” — probably his most famous poem — he describes the futility of war and the appalling conditions experienced while surviving chemical gas attacks in trenches as a soldier during that terrible conflict.
The poem's title was inspired by a line in one of the Odes of the ancient Roman poet, Horace. The Latin phrase Dulce et decorum est pro-Patria Mori means "how sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country." Even a cursory reading of the poem makes it obvious that an indignant Owen strongly disagrees with Horace and vigorously challenges that misguided notion of personal and imperial glory that Horace later came to be associated with.
Owen had defiantly mocked the idea that there was honor in dying for one's own country. Ironically, that is exactly what he ended up doing. After a stay at Craiglockhart War Hospital in late 1917, Owen returned to France to rejoin his military unit.
Only 25 years old at the time of his death, Owen had planned to publish a collection of war poems in 1919. In the book's preface, he had written
Death doesn't always have the last word. What eludes the living — be it fame, fortune, or some other form of notoriety — is often only apparent after they have departed this good earth. So it was for Wilfred Owen.
This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except war. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful.
You can read a draft of the poem that Owen wrote while recuperating from shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital, near Edinburgh, Scotland in 1917.
What Were They Fighting For?
Edmund Blunden would later teach poetry at Oxford University.
By the end of the day both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare. Neither race had won, nor could win, the War. The War had won, and would go on winning.
Poet Edmund Blunden, quoted in David Burg's Almanac of World War I, p. xii. A prolific poet and noted academic, he was nominated multiple times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is said that he spent more time in the trenches during World War I than any other famous writer who wrote about their war experiences. During his distinguished academic career, Blunden would promote and champion war poetry.
It was said that World War I was fought from 1914-1918 to end all wars. Rather than prevent future conflicts, it resulted, instead, in unprecedented levels of casualties and set the stage for even more horrific wars to come. The killings would continue well into the twentieth century and beyond.
The war shook many people's confidence in humanity to conduct itself with purpose and dignity. After almost three years of senseless killings, mass slaughter, and stalemate on the battlefield, men asked themselves: what exactly are we fighting for? To advance the great game of geopolitics envisioned by aging statesmen? To bolster the careers of obstinate military leaders? To satisfy the appetites of sovereigns blinded by national pride and enveloped in delusions of grandeur? To engage in imperialist practices with the intent to manipulate, exploit, and plunder weaker nations? Was there a method to this madness? Was there no end in sight and no way out? As the violence showed no signs of abating, the answers would elude statesmen, soldiers, and civilians.
By early 1917, many of the combatants on both the western and eastern fronts began to question their superiors and the very motives for prolonging the fighting. Most yearned for the predictable comfort of their homes and the pedestrian nature of normal, everyday existence so they could carry on peacefully with their lives.
During this period of chaos and instability, World War I would also result in some of the best literature ever written about any conflict in human history. These painfully personal recollections would strip bare nineteenth-century notions of romanticism and expose the grim realities of total war.
“In Flanders Field” and Literary Criticism
"In Flanders Field" is one of the more poignant poems of World War I. It was written by a Canadian physician and poet Lt. Colonel John McCrae on May 2nd, 1915. In it, McCrae was evoking the memory of his dead comrades and in particular, remembering a fellow soldier from Canada, Lt. Alexis Helmer, who died in the 2nd Battle of Ypres in Belgium.
The war to end all wars, it was not!
Not everyone sees the poem as symbolic of the ultimate sacrifice made by millions of men on the Allied side, even as they fought bravely without full comprehension of the very reasons that compelled them to take up arms in the first place. University of Pennsylvania literary and cultural historian Paul Fussell wrote critically of the poem for he saw its ending as an argument for perpetuating the cycle of war.
As with his earlier poems, "In Flanders Fields" continued McCrae's preoccupation with death and how it stood as the transition between the struggle of life and the peace that followed. It was written from the point of view of the dead. It spoke of their sacrifice and served as their command to the living to press on. Fussell criticized the poem in his highly-acclaimed book, The Great War and Modern Memory. He noted the distinction between the pastoral tone of the first nine lines and the "recruiting-poster rhetoric" of the third stanza. Describing it as "vicious" and "stupid," Fussell called the final lines a "propaganda argument against a negotiated peace."
As with many of the most popular works of the First World War, it was written early in the conflict, before the romanticism of war turned to bitterness and disillusionment for soldiers and civilians alike.
In another superb book, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War - one based on his recollections as a soldier in that war - Professor Fussell detailed the "absurdities, stupidities, and dehumanizing banalities of military behavior" and forcefully asserted that the purpose of any war from the perspective of the average soldier is the war itself. In that book (which I highly recommend), Professor Fussell urges us not to believe and accept the sanitized and romanticized versions of war brought to us by Hollywood movies. See the more detailed discussion about the reasons countries go to war in this 2007 diary I wrote - "Shared National Sacrifice" and 'The War' Tonight on PBS. Sketch credit: St. Paul's.
War and Societal Changes
Prolonged military conflicts impact societies in unpredictable ways. Many changes were set into motion by World War I, particularly the effect it had on redefining relationships between social classes in Britain. The dynamic between the upper classes (from where most officers came) and the working classes (who contributed mostly enlisted personnel) in that most horrendous of conflicts had been altered. One factor that contributed to this change was long periods spent together in warfare — mostly in close proximity in trenches by all classes of soldiers — with only one common goal in mind: survival. It simply meant that the old, hierarchical social order was crumbling, the distance between classes narrowing considerably, and new realities making British society gradually more egalitarian. This change was not without its problems as the attitude of the upper classes evolved only slowly, but by the war's end, change was discernible.
In Britain, there was an early "rally around the flag" effect in which many writers squarely laid the blame on Germany's aggressive military policies
This propaganda poster encourages British men to enlist together as part of the Pals Battalion in the British army. In order to foster unity among fighting men, friends, neighbors, members of social/sports groups, and work colleagues were recruited as a group and promised assignments to the same units.
The early poetry put forward the view that Britain could not have avoided going to war in 1914; that the Germans "were powerful and were so fond of bullying their neighbours that Britain could not have deterred them from beginning a world war." For example, the novelist Thomas Hardy in Men Who March Away claimed that "the braggarts must surely bite the dust". Rudyard Kipling wrote that "The Hun is at the gate" and that the men of Britain had to fight against a regime that acknowledged "no law except the sword".
Most of this early poetry also reflected the unrealistic, over-optimistic and sentimental attitude of the British people to war in 1914. Most nations believed that the war would be short and over by Christmas expecting their armies to win an immediate, decisive victory.
The war was also seen as a Christian crusade that would bring a new nobility to those who took part in it. So many men enlisted in a mood of optimistic exhilaration, assuming the war would be both chivalrous and heroic and would make better men of those who fought.
Lord Kitchener (with mustache) was the British Secretary of State for War from 1914-1916 and his image was widely used on recruitment posters. In the above poster, he is seen inspecting Australian troops in 1915 during the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign.
"War Poetry" - Charles Sturt University (New South Wales, Australia). The Military Service Act in 1916 would end voluntary recruitment and make all men between the ages of 18-51 (with some exceptions) eligible for conscription. Poster credits: Squidoo and McMaster University Libraries (Canada).
An unabashed champion of British imperialism, Rudyard Kipling was, nevertheless, a great Victorian and Edwardian writer. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1907 and was widely read in English-speaking countries. For extolling the virtues of the British Empire and his literary achievements, he was offered a knighthood and the post of Poet Laureate but turned down both offers.
Soon after the realities of prolonged trench warfare and stalemate set in on the Eastern front, initial war euphoria dissipated and all combatants dug in for the long haul. Kipling strongly pushed his son Jack to enlist and fight for his beliefs. Twice rejected by the British army due to crippling shortsightedness, Jack was only able to join the fighting in France after his famous father pulled some political strings. In 1915, Jack was reported missing in the Battle of Loos. Years would go by before Kipling would learn anything definitive about his son's fate.
Searching desperately for his son, Kipling penned the below poem — a cry of anguish from a concerned parent
"Have you news of my boy Jack?"
Not this tide.
"When d’you think that he’ll come back?"
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
"Has any one else had word of him?"
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
"Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?"
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind —
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.
Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!
Read more about this heartbreaking story in the PBS drama "My Boy Jack" — PBS. You can also watch the entire movie on YouTube. (Spanish subtitles) While acknowledging his contributions to the English language, author George Orwell referred to Kipling as the "prophet of British imperialism."
The German Post-war Point of View
Author Erich Maria Remarque had a remarkable capacity to write about the horrors of war.
If things went according to the death notices, man would be absolutely perfect.
There you find only first-class fathers, immaculate husbands, model children, unselfish, self-sacrificing mothers, grandparents mourned by all, businessmen in contrast with whom Francis of Assisi would seem an infinite egoist, generals dripping with kindness, humane prosecuting attorneys, almost holy munitions makers — in short, the earth seems to have been populated by a horde of wingless angels without one's having been aware of it.
"Prose & Poetry — Erich Maria Remarque" - The Black Obelisk. This novel by Remarque depicts life in post-World War I Germany, a defeated country beset by economic turbulence and rising nationalism. Having fought as a German soldier in WW I, he is perhaps best known for another novel describing the alienation experienced by veterans upon returning home to Germany, All Quiet on the Western Front. Photograph credit: Book Node.
How did World War I affect German soldiers? The horrors of war were experienced in all countries during World War I. Otto Dix was a German painter and relentless critic not only of the war but also of Weimar society in post-war Germany.
Below is a painting by Dix along with a poem written in 1915 by an unknown German soldier. See more of Dix's paintings and sketches, along with this terrific article on Dix by Art History and Philosophy Professor at SUNY Stony Brook, Donald Kuspit.
Self-Portrait, 1914 by Otto Dix. In this painting, he is “depicted in hellish combat with red and white flashes and eyes wide open.”
A Sapper's Song from the World War
Argonne Forest, at midnight,
A sapper stands on guard.
A star shines high up in the sky,
bringing greetings from a distant homeland.
And with a spade in his hand,
He waits forward in the sap-trench.
He thinks with longing on his love,
Wondering if he will ever see her again.
The artillery roars like thunder,
While we wait in front of the infantry,
With shells crashing all around.
The Frenchies want to take our position.
Should the enemy threaten us even more,
We Germans fear him no more.
And should he be so strong,
He will not take our position.
The storm breaks! The mortar crashes!
The sapper begins his advance.
Forward to the enemy trenches,
There he pulls the pin on a grenade.
The infantry stand in wait,
Until the hand grenade explodes.
Then forward with the assault against the enemy,
And with a shout, break into their position.
Argonne Forest, Argonne Forest,
Soon thou willt be a quiet cemetary.
In thy cool earth rests
much gallant soldiers' blood.
Read more about German war poetry here and about German anti-war artists here.
War Without Purpose — Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves
As novelist Erich Maria Remarque pointed out above, many people put up a façade in times of war and behave in conformist fashion simply because society demands that they conduct themselves in a certain way. How one outwardly appears to others may not necessarily represent reality or, even, one’s perception of oneself. Appearances, as it is often said, can be deceiving.
So was the case with Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves, three of the most famous British poets and soldiers of World War I. By the second year of the war, along with millions of fighting men, they had realized that this horrendous conflict was not going to be over anytime soon.
Weary British soldiers waiting to “go over the top.” Although fought with 20th-century technology and weapons, the tactics employed were reminiscent of 19th-century warfare. For over four years on the Western Front, both sides fought largely static trench warfare with very little advances.
By 1915, the war was being fought with the ruthlessness that seemed new and terrible. Both sides began to realise how horrific and inexhaustible were the sheer powers of destruction that were being deployed. Also, they began to doubt whether there was any hope of either side winning a swift victory. There was a deadlock on the Western Front. Long lines of trenches had been construed from the North Sea to the Alps. Allied Generals launched massive frontal attacks that proved to be futile and an obscene waste of human life.
As more and more British soldiers began to experience the horrors and discomforts of trench warfare and as they also began to doubt the wisdom of the tactics that led to spectacularly unsuccessful attacks of late 1915, such as Loos. Their poetry began to ask disconcerting questions or to express doubts.
Soldiers, especially young soldiers, began to lose faith in the British class system that promoted officers according to what school they went to, rather than on their ability. Soldiers began to feel a race apart from the civilians at home, many of whom were making profits out of the War. They seemed also to enjoy second hand accounts and experiences of the War by following the battles in the press [e.g. Paul's home leave in All Quiet on the Western Front]. They also lost faith in a God who permitted these things to occur.
Sketch credit: All Poetry.
Sassoon was 28 years old when World War I broke out. Coming from a very affluent family, his Spanish-Jewish father had left the family when Sassoon was only 5 years old and died soon after. Cambridge-educated, Sassoon was already a published poet and given his love of pastoral life in England, had been favorably compared to Thomas Hardy.
Leading a life of leisure in Kent — one which involved horse riding, cricket, golf, and fox hunting — he was in uniform the day after the war started. His initial enthusiasm soon gave way to feelings of cynicism and outrage. Critical of how the war was being conducted, he was, nonetheless, motivated by a strong sense of duty and conducted himself very bravely. Beloved by his men who called him “Mad Jack” for his daring forays into enemy territory, one of them wrote later on about him, "It was only once in a blue moon that we had an officer like Mr. Sassoon."
The above video is from the 1990s ABC television series, "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" - a fictionalized account in which Jones meets Lt. Siegfried Sassoon and Lt. Robert Graves in wartime Belgium.
You will get a really good sense of why so many men who went to war were so disillusioned by it. At the 2:35 mark of the video, Sassoon laments the continued loss of good men. He wistfully recalls that he had enlisted in the war to preserve peace and freedom. Even while doing his patriotic duty, he complains vociferously about munitions makers in England and the enormous profits reaped by industrialists. Graves is upset by such talk and leaves the other two. At this point, Jones asks Sassoon why he keeps participating in this war despite his misgivings and cynicism. Sassoon replies in a matter-of-fact manner, “Because it’s my duty!”
In the below poem, Sassoon wonders if it was worth fighting in the war and if it achieved anything.
Once the war is over, society expects soldiers to return home and resume their normal lives. Sassoon wonders, is that even possible?
Does it matter? - losing your legs?
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
Does it matter? - losing your sight?
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.
Do they matter? - those dreams in the pit?
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won't say that you’re mad;
For they know that you've fought for your country,
And no one will worry a bit.
Siegfried Sassoon's Long Journey: Selections from the Sherston Memoirs, edited by Paul Fussell, pp. x-xii.
Siegfried Sassoon’s Anti-War Statement
Disgusted by the callousness of the British military high command, Sassoon — a decorated army hero — did something unthinkable in 1917.
Sassoon had meanwhile developed increasingly angry feelings concerning the conduct of the war. This led him to publish, in The Times, a letter announcing his view that the war was being deliberately and unnecessarily prolonged by the authorities. Sassoon narrowly avoided punishment by courts-martial via the swift assistance of Robert Graves, who convinced the military review board (with Sassoon's reluctant consent) that Sassoon was suffering from shell shock.
Consequently, Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart military hospital to recover. It was while at Craiglockhart that Sassoon met and struck up a friendship with Wilfred Owen. Sassoon subsequently edited and arranged the publication of Owen's work after the war.
Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon was a decorated war veteran just doing “his duty.”
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise.
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You can watch this excellent movie "Regeneration" in full on YouTube. Based on the prize-winning anti-war novel by Pat Barker, it shows a very sensitive Dr. Rivers befriending his two patients, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, at Craiglockhart Hospital. Using innovative psychiatric techniques, he takes exceptionally good care of both soldiers. Read more about Dr. Rivers here and also about this movie here and here
The cavalier attitudes of the High Command were captured perfectly by Sassoon in his poem, "Great Men." It vividly captures the lie and the reality of war — older men sending younger men into battle to die while invoking honor, duty, and country.
It reminds one of the lyrics from Pink Floyd's classic song, “Us and Them.” The song describes the insanity of war, with both warring sides entrenched firmly in their stubbornness. War not only is hell but unleashes prejudices that threaten to divide us permanently.
Us and Them
And after all, we're only ordinary men
Me, and you
God only knows it's not what we would choose to do
Forward he cried from the rear
and the front rank died
And the General sat, as the lines on the map
moved from side to side
Grand strategies, geopolitical objectives, and tactical battle plans are for politicians and generals. In a Democratic society, soldiers don't make the decision to engage in war; political leaders, some with perverted personal agendas, do.
The great ones of the earth
Approve, with smiles and bland salutes, the rage
And monstrous tyranny they have brought to birth.
The great ones of the earth
Are much concerned about the wars they wage,
And quite aware of what those wars are worth.
You Marshals, gilt and red,
You Ministers and Princes, and Great Men,
Why can’t you keep your mouthings for the dead?
Go round the simple Cemeteries; and then
Talk of our noble sacrifice and losses
To the wooden crosses.
The above sketch is from over 100 pen-and-ink drawings and watercolours from two volumes titled: "Sketches of the War: France/Belgium". Source: Wikimedia Commons.
It is important to note that the field of psychiatry was not as advanced in the early twentieth century as it is today. There were hundreds of thousands of men who were traumatized by "shell shock" - or Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) as it is called almost a hundred years later. Learning to survive amongst wretched conditions in trenches while enduring the daily explosion of hundreds of exploding shells around them would invariably affect the bravest of soldiers.
After breaking down on the front, both Owen and Sassoon ended up in 1917 at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, Scotland under the care of Dr. W. H. R. Rivers.
Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ teeth wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, — but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hands’ palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?
These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable, and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.
Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.
Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.
This poem “builds a picture of life as a kind of living hell for soldiers returning from the battlefield, their bodies and minds irrevocably ravaged by the horrors they witnessed.” Painting credit: KharBevNor.
What Happened to the Poets Mentioned Above?
Lt. Col. John McRae (center) is pictured with Rupert Brooke (left) and Wilfred Owen.
While serving in France, John McRae died of pneumonia in January 1918. "In Flanders Field" would become hugely popular in English-speaking countries. The poppy referred to in his poem grew in abundance in Flanders and nearby battlefields containing the graves of thousands of dead soldiers. It would be adopted as the "Flower of Remembrance" on the Allied side of the war.
You can read more about the adoption of the poppy flower as symbolic of remembering the war dead here and here.
Rudyard Kipling (left) and his son, Jack, who was only 18 years old when he was killed in battle. in 1915.
The disappearance of Rudyard Kipling's son, Jack, was a tremendous blow to his parents. He was believed by the army to be wounded and missing in action. Clinging to the hope that at least he was alive, his parents escalated their search but to no avail. They asked anyone and everyone but had no luck.
Two years later in 1917, one of Jack's friends, Private Bowe - who had been suffering from shell shock - arrived at the Kiplings' house and told them that Jack had been killed in September 1915 after only being in France for three weeks. When he died, it had been raining hard and Jack was unable to see anything. The long search was over for the grieving parents. Jack Kipling was eighteen years old.
Poets Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. Both would outlive Wilfred Owen by decades.
Returning to the war following a spell at Craiglockhart, Siegfried Sassoon was posted to Palestine before returning to France where he was again wounded, forcing a return home to England. In addition to publishing anti-war rhetoric in The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918), Sassoon wrote three volumes of classic fictional autobiography loosely based upon his immediate pre-war and war experiences: Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man (1928, initially published under a pseudonym); Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930); and Sherston's Progress (1936).
He followed these with three volumes of actual autobiography: The Old Century (1938); The Weald of Youth (1942); and Siegfried's Journey (1945). Sassoon died in 1967 at the age of eighty. link
Edmund Blunden, a close friend of Sassoon, would survive the war and became a professor of poetry at Oxford University. He died in 1974 at the age of 77.
Robert Graves left England and lived most of his life in Majorca, Spain. Friends with both Wilfred Owen and Sassoon, Graves wrote one of the more memorable accounts of World War I, Goodbye to All That. The book deals with how the war swept away the old order in Europe and ushered in significant changes that touched every aspect of life. He passed away in 1985 when he was 90 years old. If his name sounds familiar, it should. He also authored I, Claudius, a historical novel on the Roman Emperor Claudius and one adapted as a popular series in the 1970s for BBC Television.
A Few Concluding Thoughts
Was this war necessary?
For it is always a question, when one speaks of imperialism, of the assertion of an aggressiveness whose real basis does not lie in the aims followed at the moment but an aggressiveness in itself. And actually history shows us people and classes who desire expansion for the sake of expanding, war for the sake of fighting, domination for the sake of dominating. It values conquest not so much because of the advantages it brings, which are often more than doubtful, as because it is conquest, success, activity. Although expansion as self-purpose always needs concrete objects to activate it and support it, its meaning is not included therein. Hence its tendency toward the infinite unto the exhaustion of its forces, and its motto: plus ultra. Thus we define: Imperialism is the object-less disposition of a state to expansion by force without assigned limits.
Joseph A. Schumpeter, "The Sociology of Imperialism" (1918) - Modern History Sourcebook. Sketch credit: Express (UK).
If some of you interpret this diary as an anti-war statement about a futile and senseless war that should have never been fought, only because it is one. Not all wars are unnecessary, but many are just that.
Credit: Amazon
Prussian General Carl Von Clausewitz famously said once that war was simply the continuation of politics by other means. The outbreak of hostilities also signifies, importantly, a failure of diplomacy and conflict resolution.
Deliberately or not, some leaders of European countries had been marching toward and preparing for war for a number of years. They did next to nothing to stop it. Once such preparations gather momentum of their own, it is virtually impossible to reverse the trend. As British military historian John Keegan pointed out, there was a flurry of diplomatic activity and last-minute attempts in various European capitals in July 1914 to reconcile political differences. By then, it was too late and nothing could prevent the Guns of August from erupting loudly for four long years.
Therein lies the tragedy of World War I. Remember to take the diary poll.
John Keegan, The First World War, pp. 24-47.
