The Missing of the Somme Read Online Free PDF Page B

ripped out. Not only that, but in his last weeks we lose sight of Owen as an individual (there are no eyewitness
accounts of his death) and have to resort to the wide-angle of regimental history. Dominic Hibberd has fleshed out this period somewhat in
Wilfred Owen: The Last Year
, but both books stop
where Owen’s life really begins – with his death.
    In his lifetime Owen published only five poems (‘Song of Songs’, ‘The Next War’, ‘Miners’, ‘Hospital Barge’ and ‘Futility’). Seven
appeared in Edith Sitwell’s
Wheels
anthology of 1919; a slim selection, edited by Sassoon, came out the following year; Edmund Blunden’s more substantial edition was published
in 1931. This means that Owen’s poems cameto the notice of the public not as gestures of
protest
but as part of a larger structure of
bereavement
.
    The period from the armistice onwards saw the construction of memorials throughout England and cemeteries throughout Flanders and northern France. Climaxing with a flash flood of war memoirs and
novels in the late 1920s, 7 this phase of protracted mourning was formally completed with the inauguration of the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at
Thiepval in 1932.
    The extent to which the strands of this fabric of loss are intertwined can be glimpsed by the way that in 1931 Blunden borrowed the ‘official’ vocabulary of Remembrance to lament
‘how great a
glory
had departed’ from the world of poetry with Owen’s death.
    In the years following the armistice the anti-war spirit was so strong that, as the mature Eric Blair (George Orwell) noted, ‘even the men who had been slaughtered were held in some way to
blame’. But the hope that the anti-war case had been clinched for good, on the other hand – by the war poets particularly and by Owen especially – proved short-lived.
    Christopher Isherwood, who was born in 1904, the year after Orwell, recalls that ‘we young writers of the middle twenties were all suffering, more or less consciously, from afeeling of shame that we hadn’t been able to take part in the European War’. The war for Isherwood was a subject of ‘all-consuming morbid interest’, ‘a
complex of terrors and longings’. Longing could sometimes outweigh terror as the Orwell-Isherwood generation ‘became conscious of the vastness of the experience they had missed’.
Hence the fascination of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell goes on, ‘was that it was so like the Great War’.
    Looking back, C. Day Lewis considered that it was Owen’s poetry which ‘came home deepest to my generation, so that we could never again think of war as anything but a vile, if
necessary, evil’. But this generation was faced with other, apparently greater evils; hence W. H. Auden’s ‘easy acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder’ in his 1937 poem
‘Spain’. Owen may have exposed, as Stephen Spender claimed in an essay of the same year, ‘the propagandist lie which makes the dead into heroes in order that others may imagine
that death is really quite pleasant’, but this revealed truth was not without its own allure. Philip Toynbee, a veteran of the Spanish War, recalls that Owen’s poems ‘produced
envy rather than pity for a generation that had experienced so much’. Keats, the most powerful influence on Owen before his encounter with Sassoon, had declared himself to be ‘half in
love with easeful death’, but Owen had apparently done little to diminish the fear of violent death. ‘Even in our anti-war campaigns of the early thirties,’ remembers Toynbee,
‘we were half in love with the horrors we cried out against.’
    The realities of the war, then, were not simply overlaid by an organized cult of Remembrance (Cenotaph, Unknown Soldier, two minutes’ silence, poppies, etc.). Rather, our ideaof the war, with its elaborately entwined, warring ideas of ‘myth’ and ‘reality’, was actively constructed through elaborately entwined, warring versions of
memory