The Missing of the Somme Read Online Free PDF

simply
appalling but ‘grimly appalling’, Nigel Viney, in
Images of Wartime
, soon finds himself descending into ‘the very depths of infinite horror’.
    The most horrific aspect of the Great War was the waste of lives as men were sent to the front in battles of meaningless attrition. Is their cause served appropriately, one wonders, by a verbal
strategy which relies, for its meaning, on constantly reinforcing attrition?
    Strings of shuddering adjectives dull the reaction they are intended to induce. The calm, measured tread of Elaine Scarry’s formulation, by contrast, is terrible in its simplicity:
‘The main purpose and outcome of war is injuring.’
    ‘Before the Great War there was no war poetry as we now conceive the term,’ writes Peter Parker in
The Old Lie
; ‘instead there was martial
verse.’ So pervasive were the conventions of feeling produced by this tradition that in 1914 the eleven-year-old Eric Blair could write a heartfelt poem – ‘Awake, young men of
England’ – relying entirely on received sentiment. In exactly the same way, an eleven-year-old writing fifty years on could, in similar circumstances, come up with a heartfelt poem
expressing the horror of war – while also relying solely on received sentiment.
    In some ways, then, we talk of the horror of war as instinctively and enthusiastically as Rupert Brooke and hiscontemporaries jumped at the chance of war ‘like
swimmers into cleanness leaping’.
    This is not just a linguistic quibble. Off-the-peg formulae free you from thinking for yourself about what is being said. Whenever words are bandied about automatically and easily, their meaning
is in the process of leaking away or evaporating. The ease with which Rupert Brooke coined his ‘think only this of me’ heroics by embracing a ready-made formula of feeling should alert
us to – and make us sceptical of – the ease with which these sentiments have been overruled by another. Isaac Rosenberg acutely condemned Rupert Brooke’s ‘begloried
sonnets’ for their reliance on ‘second-hand phrases’. But there is a similarly second- or third-hand whiff to critic Keith Sagar’s indignant characterization of Armistice
Day as
    part of the process whereby the nation promises to remember for one day a year in order to be able to forget with a clear conscience for the other three hundred and
     sixty-four; the process whereby the nation accepts with pride the slaughter of a whole generation of its youth. The rhetoric of the Cenotaph ceremony is a continuance in solemn guise of the
     lying jingoism which prompted Owen to write three months before his death: ‘I wish the Boche would have the pluck to come right in and make a clean sweep of the pleasure boats, and the
     promenaders on the spa, and all the stinking Leeds and Bradford warprofiteers . . .’
    Owen is regularly invoked to challenge or undermine the official procedures of Remembrance in this way, but ourmemory of the Great War actually depends on
the mutual support of these two ostensibly opposed coordinates: the Unknown Soldier and the poet everyone knows.
    Owen was born in Shropshire on 18 March 1893. He was teaching in France when war was declared but volunteered for the Artists’ Rifles in 1915. Under the influence of Sassoon, whom he met
at Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917 while suffering from shell-shock, he began writing the war poems on which his reputation rests. He returned to France and was killed in action a week before the
armistice, aged twenty-five.
    The extreme brevity of his life is brought out by Jon Stallworthy’s
Wilfred Owen
, the standard biography. Since Stallworthy diligently allots more or less the same amount of space
to each phase of Owen’s life, by the time we come to the part we’re most interested in, the period of his major poems, we realize with a shock that there is only a fraction of the book
left. It is as if the remaining 700 pages of a standard-sized life have simply been