Some Desperate Glory (21 page)

Wilfred Owen wrote many of the great poems of his last year at Scarborough and Ripon, perhaps because the front-line traumas of 1917 could be recalled in the comparative calm of a home posting (and a room of his own) alongside the extraordinary stimulation given by Sassoon. Some, like ‘Dulce et Decorum Est', ‘The Dead Beat' (criticized by Sassoon and later redrafted), ‘The Sentry' and possibly ‘Insensibility', were begun in 1917 at Craiglockhart, then worked on at Scarborough and Ripon and, after August 1918, in France. ‘Spring Offensive' was based on what he'd seen on the western front in April 1917; ‘Strange Meeting' came in Scarborough and Ripon from January to March 1918. In May, in Ripon, he probably began a draft of the preface that would appear in collections of his poetry.

Such graphic, compassionate work was timely, for the spring brought another huge attack in the west. The treaty of Brest Litovsk with the new Soviet Russia had led to large German gains that reached into the Baltic States and what are now Poland, Belarus and western Ukraine. It also released troops from the eastern front. German strength in the west increased by some 30 per cent after November 1917, and Allied forces declined, after Passchendaele and Cambrai. The German General Ludendorff knew that speed was vital. He chose the British as the weakest point, where they joined the French part of the line.

On 21 March, the Germans attacked along a front of some fifty-five miles, beginning with a creeping barrage and infiltration of infantry through a morning mist. The British retreat fell into chaos, even though the attack had been expected, failing to destroy bridges and roads, letting the enemy surge even faster forward. Ernst Jünger wrote of joyful hysteria, of how ‘the immense desire to destroy that overhung the battlefield precipitated a red mist in our brains. We called out sobbing and stammering fragments of sentences to one another, and an impartial observer might have concluded that we were all ecstatically happy.' The giant rail junction at Amiens was under threat by 25 March, with the British some twenty-four miles back from what four days earlier had been their front line.

Isaac Rosenberg dreamed of getting into a Jewish battalion that was bound for the Middle East. Marsh tried to fix this but failed, and on 8 March – in reserve, repairing roads and bringing up supplies – Rosenberg wrote of his dread of wet weather, for ‘We will become like mummies – look warm and lifelike, but a touch and we will crumble to pieces.' His ambition was to finish another verse drama, ‘The Unicorn', that would show war and the forces let loose ‘by an ambitious and unscrupulous will' or a pitiless God.

Rosenberg was back in the front line when the Germans attacked. His unit retreated into reserve, then further back, and in the turmoil he wrote ‘Through These Pale Cold Days'. This, his last poem, could refer to the longed-for Jewish battalion: the ‘dark faces' that ‘burn / out of three thousand years, / and their wild eyes yearn': the end hinting at a premonition of his own death. Isaac Rosenberg was killed by a sniper or a raiding party at dawn on 1 April. Some words were found among his effects: ‘How small a thing is art. A little pain; disappointment, and any man feels a depth – a boundlessness of emotion, inarticulate thoughts no poet has ever succeeded in imaging. Death does not conquer me, I conquer death, I am the master.'

Siegfried Sassoon was sent to Palestine that spring. The journey went, strangely, through Ireland after Craiglockhart. Stationed with his regiment in Limerick, Sassoon hunted, moved among the gentry, feeling oddly in limbo, and avoided the IRA in a country still simmering after the Easter Rising of 1916. On 11 February, he left for the Middle East to join General Allenby's Egyptian Expedition Force.

On the voyage out, Sassoon met soldiers from a Jewish volunteer battalion (perhaps the one that Rosenberg had tried to join) at Taranto and, as if forgetting his own Jewish roots, let slip some mild anti-Semitism in his diary. In Palestine, he found desolate hills, a sunlit landscape and, for a change, victory. Jerusalem and Jericho had fallen to Allenby's forces, ‘Johnny Turk' was on the run and Sassoon's commanding officer joked about shooting prisoners. Then reports came of the German offensive on the western front and loss of most of the ground gained since the Somme.

Reinforcements were needed in France. Sassoon went first to Alexandria in Egypt, where he had hoped – but failed – to see E. M. Forster, who was working there for the Red Cross. Forster now dreaded what might happen after the war, for so much jingoism and false feeling, so much hatred, had been released. Any new peaceful Britain must, the novelist felt, be worse than the country he'd known in 1914.

Sassoon and his battalion reached the south of France, leaving Marseilles by train on 9 May to go north to the front. Much had happened since the launch of the German offensive. Harsh terms had been imposed on Romania, giving Germany and Austria-Hungary control over the country's oil fields for ninety-nine years, again showing how demanding the Germans would be in any peace negotiations. In April, however, an attack on the Lys spread their forces too thinly. On 3 April the Allies rallied with a new unified command under the French Marshal Foch. An officer friend told Ivor Gurney of the improvement: how much better the French staff was than the British. Even the dour Haig rose to the crisis, issuing a stirring statement on 11 April: ‘With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.' The writer Vera Brittain, nursing at the front – and no fan of the High Command – wrote after reading this, ‘I knew I should go on, whether I could or not.'

The German successes of March – 140 square miles seized in only twenty-four hours, with 39,000 casualties, as against 98 square miles gained by the Allies in 1916 on the Somme, over 140 days, with 1.5 million casualties – hid hunger and despair within Germany and dwindling manpower, even with the arrival of troops from the east. American entry into the war led to an intensification of the economic blockade, made worse by bad harvests in 1916 and 1917. German troops on leave were sick of fighting and disheartened by the worsening conditions at home; of those transferring to the west from Russia up to 10 per cent deserted on the way. Industrial unrest spread through the factories. The offensives led to drawn-out supply lines and exhaustion. In July the French began the Allied counter-attack on the Marne.

Wilfred Owen waited to go out. At Ripon in May, he made plans for a post-war world, a traditional vision: blank-verse plays on old Welsh themes, looking to Tennyson and Yeats; a
Collected Poems
in 1919;
Perseus
, a volume presumably inspired by myth, and another entitled
Idylls in Prose
.

There's a voluptuousness in the Ripon and Scarborough poems, a richness of detail and emotion, which shows the influence not only of Keats and Shelley but of the 1890s. Owen sent some drafts to Siegfried Sassoon who, on the evidence of these, wondered later why at Craiglockhart he'd thought this young man to be merely promising. Perhaps it had been the artlessness of the eager disciple or that effusive ‘border-Welsh temperament'; now he saw the power of ‘my little friend Wilfred'. Later Sassoon doubted if he'd had much effect on Owen, or had achieved anything beyond giving encouragement. Owen might, Sassoon thought, ‘have done just as well if he had never met me. He was a born poet, & had he lived, would have produced some of the most beautiful & original poetry of his time.' What Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen might have achieved together haunted the survivor.

In May 1918, Sassoon arrived again on the western front. To begin with, he was out of the line, near Crécy, site of an English victory during the Hundred Years War, where he trained troops and felt overcome with sympathy for them. The fighting had moved across the old Festubert line, with the Germans still making gains. Until July Sassoon was in billets near Domvast, among beechwoods, bluebells, orchards and hawthorns, writing fatalistically to Graves to say that he'd left him £250 a year and that Robert Nichols (‘the best poet of the three') must write an elegy about him if he was killed.

Like Forster, Sassoon wondered what peace might bring. The omens were bad. Robbie Ross's London had descended into turmoil as Lord Alfred Douglas, once (like Ross) Oscar Wilde's lover, embarked upon a campaign of public abuse against former friends of Wilde and homosexuals in general. ‘Robbie' had introduced Sassoon to greater literary and sexual frankness; now this was threatened by intolerance and a home front of attention-seeking and ignorance. In March the police raided Ross's flat; in June a maverick member of parliament, Noel Pemberton Billing, claimed that the Germans had a black book of some 47,000 British homosexuals whom Billing would name. It seemed to Sassoon, Forster and others that to their own country they were now the enemy within.

As he moved into the front line, Siegfried Sassoon's second wartime collection of poems was published, entitled
Counter-Attack
, some of which he'd shown to Owen at Craiglockhart. The print run of 1,500 showed that sales of
The Old Huntsman
had been good, although not on the scale of Oxenham or even Nichols: that Sassoon was now famous as a rebel hero. The Cambridge academic Edward Dent, who'd loathed the war and its jingo patriotism from the start, thought that the book was devastating; Sassoon's doctor at Craiglockhart, Rivers, however, worried about the poet's ‘damned hankering after death'. Thomas Hardy especially liked the title piece and ‘To Any Dead Officer'. In November 1917, Edmund Blunden had left the line near Ypres to go on a signalling course – a routine set up at least partly to give soldiers a useful rest – returning to his battalion in the New Year before going on leave on 13 January 1918. It was in England that Blunden read
Counter-Attack
,
impressed by the collection not only as ‘a portrait of war' but also because of the ‘recollected charm of peace': an illustration of how soldiers needed to think of home.

There was some criticism. Middleton Murry said in the
Nation
that Sassoon's torment and suffering were more significant than his poetry, which was mere floating verses without deep thought, far from Wordsworth's classic definition of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity'. To Bertrand Russell, Murry's opinions showed the ‘safe smugness' of the Bloomsbury conscientious objectors who, in contrast to Russell's time in jail for his anti-war protests, had safe billets working fitfully on farms. ‘Ouf! I hate all the Bloomsbury crew, with their sneers at anything that has live feeling in it,' he told Lady Ottoline Morrell. ‘
Beastly
of them to be down on S.S.'

The Murry review came out on 11 July, the day that Sassoon, in the line near Saint Floris, had a direct hit on his dug-out. Having resumed his patrols in no man's land, he went out the next day with a corporal for over two hours. Returning in the early morning of 13 July, he stood up to look back and, having been mistaken for a German by a British soldier, was shot in the head. Robert Nichols, typically melodramatic, claimed that the High Command had ordered Siegfried Sassoon's execution because of his views on the war. Sassoon was taken to the American Red Cross Hospital in London, where he wrote his ‘Letter to Robert Graves', a disjointed poem of suffering and shock that lets him be claimed for modernism.

Five days after Sassoon had been wounded, on 18 July, the French counter-attacked on the Marne; and on 8 August the British, Australians and Canadians advanced at Amiens. These months of fighting were as hard as any that had gone before, but Haig at last succeeded in combining devastating artillery firepower with carefully measured infantry attacks on a retreating enemy.

Siegfried Sassoon wasn't the only war poet to suffer from what Russell called Bloomsbury ‘sneers'. Working under the strain of trying to please the poet's puritanical mother – who gave him the most depressing time of his life – Edward Marsh edited Rupert Brooke's
Collected Poems
. This was published in the summer of 1918 – and included his own memoir of Brooke – and, that August, Virginia Woolf reviewed the book in the
Times Literary Supplement
. Even those like Woolf who had detested the war (and Rupert Brooke's attitude to it) remained impressed by the man. Woolf said, however, that Marsh's memoir was incomplete and gently mocked its occasionally gushing tone while scarcely mentioning the poems. To Brooke's contemporaries (she added) it didn't seem to matter that he wrote poetry; the looks, the intellectual vigour and curiosity about writing and life, even his diet and clothes, were much more his point. For Virginia Woolf the question was not what he'd written but ‘what would he have been'. She thought that this ‘most restless, complex and analytic of human beings' would have become a modern writer of ‘subtle, analytic poetry, or prose perhaps, full of intellect and full of his keen unsentimental curiosity'. To her diary, however, she was more scathing, calling the book ‘a disgraceful sloppy sentimental rhapsody' that left its subject ‘rather tarnished', yet she recorded, while staying with Lytton Strachey, ‘a great deal of talk about Rupert'.

Virginia Woolf never met and at that date had never heard of Wilfred Owen. But Owen's version of the war would grow slowly to eclipse that of Brooke which, as her comments show, was already (as early as August 1918) starting to fade into historical curiosity. Owen's spring and early summer had been spent at Ripon, then back at Scarborough in June, and had seen the publication of ‘Song of Songs' in the
Bookman
and ‘Hospital Barge' and ‘Futility' in the
Nation
.

Owen saw Ross and Scott Moncrieff in London in May and met Osbert Sitwell, another poet who'd been at the front. The Sitwells – Osbert and his sister Edith – wanted Owen's poems for
Wheels
, a journal started by them at least partly in opposition to Georgian pastoral nostalgia. Owen was again in London on 12 August, visiting Sassoon in hospital and seeing the Sitwells; on 31 August during his last hours before leaving for France, he saw the Harrow boy bathing near him in the Channel, a magnificent ‘piece' of England. The day before Owen had quoted, to his mother, the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore's words, ‘When I go from hence let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.'