The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (26 page)

The situation in 1914, Stromberg continues, had a unique quality about it that had never quite existed before and would not do so again: “It was a moment in the growth of consciousness”; the most significant motif was the “raw reality” of the reappearance of the sense of community. For many, he insisted, the war’s psychological origins were not malevolent: they involved, rather, “a powerful thirst for identity, community, purpose—positive and, in themselves, worthy goals, perverted and misdirected but not poisoned at the springs.”
23

The spirit of the year 1914 was “an antidote to anomie, which had resulted from the sweep of powerful forces of the recent past—urban, capitalistic, and technological forces tearing up primeval bonds and forcing people into a crisis of social relationship.”
24
But the antidote brought with it too high a price and so we are still searching for a viable alternative.

Given the importance of the themes of redemption and of restoration of community, and given the horrific nightmare that trench warfare quickly turned into, it is perhaps no surprise that two elements came to the fore in the Great War that particularly concern us here. One was poetry and the other was socialism. Socialism as a surrogate religion is considered in the next chapter. The extent to which poetry and war went together was extraordinary and revealing.

IRONY AND INNOCENCE

“At no other time in the twentieth century has verse formed the dominant literary form” that it did during the First World War (at least in the English language), and there are those such as Bernard Bergonzi, whose words these are, who argue that English poetry “never got over the Great War.” To quote Francis Hope, the British poet-critic, “In a not altogether rhetorical sense, all poetry since 1918 is war poetry.” Again, in retrospect it is not difficult to see why this should have been so. Many of the young men who went to the front were well educated, which in those days included being familiar with English literature. Life at the front, intense and uncertain as it was, lent itself to a shorter, sharper, more compact verse structure, and provided arresting and vivid images in abundance. And in the unhappy event of the author’s death, the elegiac nature of a slim volume had an undeniable romantic appeal. Many boys who went straight from the cricket field to the Somme or Passchendaele made poor poets, and the bookshops were crammed with verse that, in other circumstances, would never have been published. But among these a few stood out who are now household names.

Moreover, as Nicholas Murray has pointed out in
The Red Sweet Wine of Youth: The Brave and Brief Lives of the War Poets
, those poets have never been more popular than they are today, a hundred years later. “War poetry is currently studied in every school in Britain. It has become part of the mythology of nationhood, and an expression of both historical consciousness and political conscience. The way we read—and perhaps revere—war poetry says something about what we are and want to be, as a nation.”
25
Websites are now dedicated to the war poets, and as the former poet laureate Andrew Motion has said, their work now comprises “a sacred national text.”

Not that many of them confronted our subject directly. Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were, by their own admission, anti-clerical. Sassoon described himself as “a very incomplete and unpractising Christian . . . the Churches seemed to me to offer no solution to the demented doings on the western front. . . . As far as I can remember, no one at the Front ever talked to me about religion at all. And the padres never came
near us—except to bury someone.”
26
His poem “Christ and the Soldier” was about a roadside Calvary in France “which, for most soldiers, was merely a reminder of the inability of religion to cope with the carnage and catastrophe.” In “February Afternoon” (1916), Edward Thomas found scant consolation in religion: in the poem, God looks down “stone-deaf and stone-blind.” Wilfred Owen said he had escaped from evangelical religion by mid-1912: “All Theological lore is growing distasteful to me.”
27
Edmund Blunden’s poem “Report on Experience,” one of his best, contains the lines:

. . . I have seen the righteous forsaken,

His health, his honor and his quality taken.

and culminates with an ironic “God bless us all.”
28

Irony. In his classic book
The Great War and Modern Memory
, Paul Fussell argues: “there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”
29
He gives examples of what he means. One reason the Great War can be seen as more ironic than any other is that its beginning was more innocent. Britain had not known a major war for a century. No man in the prime of his life knew what war was like. As Ernest Hemingway was to note, abstract words like “glory,” “honor,” “courage” were hollow and obscene alongside “the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.” Fussell lists propagandistic euphemisms that tried to lessen the impact of what was happening: a friend is a
comrade
; a horse is a
steed
; danger is
peril
; warfare is
strife
; not to complain is to be
manly
; the blood of young men is “The red / Sweet wine of youth”
(Rupert Brooke). Apparently, war was at first regarded by some as a game, almost—at the Battle of Loos in 1915, the 1st Battalion of the 18th London Regiment allegedly kicked a football toward the enemy lines while making their attack.

In many of the stories told about the war, the ending—and the nearest these stories come to a meaning—is ironic. Fussell quotes an episode from Edmund Blunden’s
Undertones of War
in which the author came across
a young lance corporal making tea in the trenches. Blunden wished him a good tea and moved on. Moments later a shell burst on the trench and the lance corporal was reduced to “gobbets of blackening flesh.” While Blunden was taking this in, “the lance-corporal’s brother came round the traverse.”

The range of psychic phenomena reported at the front itself was vast, Jay Winter reports, though the emergence of pagan or pre-rational modes of thought under the appalling stress of combat should surprise no one. Many soldiers carried cards bearing lucky emblems on their person, a different card carried in different pockets. Others carried soil from their home village or dust from their local church or chapel. One chaplain from Aberdeen remarked: “The British soldier has certainly got religion; I am not so sure, however, that he has got Christianity.”
30
The problem was that “the experience of the trenches could not easily be explained in conventional theological (or indeed any other rational) terms.”

Spiritualism proliferated most among those without strong ties to established churches. The Frenchman Charles Richet conducted a remarkable piece of research at
the front, publishing his results in the
Bulletin des armées de la République
in January 1917. There had been many respondents—ordinary soldiers, doctors, officers—and they reported most commonly accurate premonitions of death, not just among the combatants themselves but among members of their families back home.

In Britain, Hereward Carrington produced a study entitled
Psychical Phenomena and the War
, which explored cases of dead soldiers apparently sending messages of hope and consolation to their grieving loved ones; and in both France and Britain there were many accounts of dead soldiers attending ceremonies of remembrance. Others saw angels on the battlefield, phantom cavalrymen, “luminous mists.” Winter makes the point that proper burial was by no means guaranteed, or indeed the norm, which must help to account for many of these reports. It was this universality of bereavement that fed what Winter calls the “spiritualist temptation.” This was all surely understandable, but no more than were the revulsion, disillusion and cynicism that came out of the four years of carnage, from which some sort of “meaning” had to be extracted.

Fussell quotes Philip Larkin’s poem “MCMXIV,” written in the early
1960s, under the title “Never Such Innocence Again”; and this is Fussell’s main point, that irony then entered the world
as meaning
, even as redemption. But irony offers only small meanings, paradoxical meanings—you could say it is even
anti
-meaning and certainly
anti
-transcendental.

One can see what Fussell means. After the “Great” War, the very concept of “greatness”—great projects, great motives, great ideas—was under deep suspicion, if not dead in the water. This is perhaps why poetry was the dominant artistic wartime form: life—the good life, bad life, trench life, home life (when you are separated from your family)—is made up of the small things poets observe, the all-important details which, as often as not ironically, are made to seem meaningful. As the poets said, and as the phenomenologists and pragmatists had said before them, all the use in life is in the small things. That is one meaning of the Great War. When irony enters the imagination, truth is not the first casualty of war: innocence is. This was an earthquake in the landscape of belief. After the Great War, people no longer trusted belief.

•   •   •

Theosophy and spiritualism may be thought of as having attempted to rescue religion by giving it a “scientific” credibility that Christianity was seen to lack.
31
According to H. R. Rookmaaker in
Modern Art and the Death of a Culture
, “Mondrian and others were building a beautiful fortress for spiritual humanity, very formal, very rational . . . they did so on the edge of a deep, deep abyss, one into which they did not dare to look.”
32
But, he said, another school emerged that did look into the abyss—Surrealism.

The immediate precursor to the Surrealists was Giorgio de Chirico, whose self-portrait of 1913 was entitled
And What Shall I Worship Save the Enigma?
Several of his other paintings continue the theme:
The Enigma of a Day
(1914),
The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street
(1914) and
The Disquieting Muse
(1916). All of these show his concern with the disturbingly strange in the midst of the ordinary, with strange lighting, long shadows where the source of the shadow is not shown.
33
His own comment on his work is that it seeks to identify a “presentiment” that has existed since prehistory. “We might consider it,” he says, “as an eternal proof of the irrationality of the universe.” This uncanny feeling, by implication, is where the religious sentiment comes from.

André Breton picked up on this in his
Surrealist Manifesto
(1924), in which he stated that it was the Surrealists’ aim to break free of the rational by such means as “free” (or automatic) writing—of the kind Yeats had indulged in with his wife—in order to uncover the irrational forces of the unconscious. In this sense, Surrealism sought to self-consciously re-enchant a world that had been de-sacralized by science and, to that extent, it was essentially therapeutic.

Surrealism was different among modern art forms in being technically extremely accomplished (which helped make it popular), and different in that it was concerned with dreams, the possibility of their symbolism representing a “deeper” reality below conscious life; and that order is merely on the surface and a different kind of meaning lies below. Breton stressed “the omnipotence of the dream” in his manifesto, and also that there were “certain superior forms” that remained to be discovered, the mark of them all being their irrationality. Surrealism sought to reveal these hidden forms, “dictated by thought in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”
34

This rejection of reason owed a lot, of course, to the ravages of the war and the sense that a new mode of living was now required. This was epitomized by Max Ernst, who wrote in his autobiography: “Max Ernst died on August 1, 1914. He was resuscitated on November 11, 1918, as a young man aspiring to become a magician and to find the myths of his time.”
35
The new myths were intended to replace the old one, and this was shown most clearly in Ernst’s painting
The Virgin Mary Spanking the Infant Jesus before Three Witnesses
(1926), the witnesses being Ernst himself, Breton and Paul Éluard. The painting parodies High Renaissance figures and pagan motifs. In several other paintings Ernst introduced non-Christian sources, as did Paul Delvaux and Joan Miró in their Surrealist work.
36

But what strike us, above all, are the Surrealists’ technical mastery and their compelling attempts to depict the disturbing world of the unconscious (though Freud observed that, however dreamlike Dalí’s works were, for example, they were still the product of the conscious mind). The technical mastery was more than incidental. Méret Oppenheim has been described as a Surrealist—her
Fur Breakfast
is composed of a standard cup, saucer and spoon made of fur. This is also pure phenomenol
ogy, drawing attention to the everyday qualities of cups and saucers and spoons by the simple expedient of interfering with that everydayness. The Surrealists aimed to show that there is more to reality than we think, that chaos and absurdity are as much a part of the human condition as reason, that irrationalism is a disturbing force, producing mystery, fear and wonder in equal measure, and that there is a difference between the surreal and the supernatural.

Perhaps the seminal Surrealist work is René Magritte’s
The Human Condition
. This technically very accomplished picture shows a painting of sea and sand on an easel that is itself on a beach, so that the image on the canvas runs into the “real” view beyond. It is disturbing, but conveys successfully the idea that being disturbed doesn’t “mean” anything. Religion is a response to a disturbing or fearful feeling that is just part of the human condition, a mystery that doesn’t mean anything.