He
did not have to be there. He could have
ridden out the war on convalescence or light rear echelon duty. But there he was, leading a meaningless ford
of a meaningless canal when a German bullet
found his handsome head on November 4, 1918, one week almost to the hour before
the Armistice that everyone knew was
coming was declared. His parents, back
England would open the telegram as church bells pealed the news. In death Second
Lieutenant Wilfred Owen—his promotion to First Lieutenant would arrive a
day too late—would become hailed as the greatest poet of the charnel house
called The Great War.
He
started life, of course, as something else.
He
was born in the comfortable home of his English
mother’s father near Oswestry in
Shropshire on March 18, 1893. His Welch
father was a low level railroad functionary. Wilfred was the oldest of four children who
adored their mother. She would imbue
them all with a religious fervor rooted in evangelistic
Anglicanism.
In
1897 the grandfather died and the comfortable home was sold. The family was forced into crowded quarters
to match his father’s limited income. They
moved frequently as his father was transferred back and forth between Birkenhead in Cheshire and Shrewsbury
back in Shropshire. Eventually his
father was raised to the dignity of station
master.
The
family was of the lowest level middle
class, distinguished from the top rungs of the skilled working class not by income, but by simply working with paper and
not getting dirty hands. They looked on
their betters with ambitious longing. It
was the perfect combination of Anglican loyalty and yearning for respectability
for the creation of loyal Tories.
Young
Wilfred was educated at Birkenhead
Institute and at Shrewsbury
Technical School. He did well
enough, but not too well. At age 10 he
discovered John Keats and other
English romantic poets and fell in
love. Together with the majestic cadences
of the familiar King James Version of
The
Bible they were the influences on his style. He began writing his own poetry and became by
his late teenage years quite competent, if unoriginal.
Owen
completed his education at the Wyle Cop
school in Shrewsbury where he was
both a pupil and a teacher to the younger children. In 1911 he passed the matriculation exam for
the University of London. But he
failed to win top honors which would have made him eligible for a
scholarship. His family could not afford
the tuition.
Instead
he went to work as a lay assistant to the Vicar
of Dunsden near Reading. He was given free board and hoped to earn
enough money—or the patronage of the Vicar—to continue his education. He attended University College, Reading studying botany part time and attracted the attention of the head of the
English department who encouraged him to study Old English.
His
time at Dusden was disillusioning. He
found the once familiar liturgies of
the Church uninspiring and incapable of inspiring his natural faith. Worse, he found the established church cold, indifferent,
even hostile to the plight of the poor and working classes to which he was reminded
rudely that he belonged.
A
proclivity for French proved a way
out. In 1913 he found work as a private
tutor of English and French at the Berlitz
School of Languages in Bordeaux,
France.
Later, he went into the service of a private family. Owen found relatively egalitarian France a
relief from the rigid constraints of the British class system which offered him
seeming not path forward beyond the life of drudge clerk.
His
horizons were further expanded when he met Laurent
Tailhade a 69 year old poet famed for his satirical verse and his unapologetic
anarchism. Tailhade encouraged his literary ambitions
and the two continued to correspond after Owen returned to England.
When
war broke out in 1914 Owen was in a quandary.
He considered enlisting in the French army, but the life of an enlisted Poilu had little appeal. The war was well under way when Owen finally
enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles Officers’
Training Corps, a unit of the Territorial
Army. He likely held out in hopes of
becoming an officer. He trained for
seven month in Essex before being conditionally commissioned and assigned to
the 2nd Manchester Regiment.
Owen
was singularly unimpressed by the quality of his men, recruited from the gritty
lower working classes of industrial Manchester.
They brought out the latent Tory in him, along with the arrogance that
often seems come with fresh faced baby officers assigned to war weary veteran
troops. He described his men in a letter
home as louts and “expressionless lumps.”
None
the less he arrived in France to go into battle with them just after Christmas, 1916. He wasted no time discovering horror. For four months he and his men were in and
out of the front lines or, as he put it frankly in a letter to his mother, “I
can see no excuse for deceiving you about these 4 days. I have suffered seventh
hell. I have not been at the front. I have been in front of it.”
Owen
suffered several harrowing experiences. He
suffered a concussion in a fall into a shell
crater. He was blown into the air by
the impact of a trench mortar and
spent days stunned and wounded lying with the remains of another officer on an
embankment in Savy Wood. Whatever romantic notions of warfare he may
have entertained at the beginning were blown skyward with him—and so, nearly
was his mind.
Diagnosed
with neurasthenia or shell shock and deemed “unfit to lead
troops,” Owen was shipped home, arriving back in Britain on May 2, 1917. He was sent to convalesce at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh which was pioneering in the treatment of “the thousand
yard stare.”
Owen
stay at Craiglockhart would profoundly change the rest of his short life. He had begun to try to process his war
experience in poems, but he was still locked in the form and style of Keats and
Shelly, not suitable for the gut wrenching subject matter. His doctor, Arthur Brock encouraged him to process the nightmares and dreams of
war he was having into poetry as a kind of therapy. That began a transformation.
But
Owen was most deeply affected by the arrival of an already famed war poet, as a patient in the
same hospital. Sassoon represented a lot of what Owen had always aspired to
be. He came from a wealthy family, if
not an entirely proper one. His father a
member of the Iraqi/Jewish Sassoon
merchant family, disinherited for marrying a wealthy Anglo-Catholic. He was brought
up in a stately house, well educated at Cambridge
even if he failed to get a degree, a devoted cricketer, and a rising
poet. He enlisted when the war broke out
and served in France with conspicuous bravery even as he became embittered by
the war.
While
on convalescence Sassoon, who was already well known, had a scathing letter
attacking British motives and conduct in the war published in the press. Deeply embarrassed, the brass hustled him to Craiglockhart
on the pretext of treatment for shell shock.
In
no time at all Sassoon took Owen under his wing. It started out as a worshipful
mentor/apprentice relationship with Sassoon going over Owen’s work, gently
critiquing it, making suggestions, and urging him to not spare on the ugly
realities they both had experienced.
But
the relationship blossomed into something much more. Call it love, filial or carnal, take your
pick. Sassoon was homosexual and comfortable with it.
Owen was repressed and in denial.
Slowly he began to open up and hints of homo-erotica began to appear in his work. Were they actually lovers? Opinion is divided and evidence is
scant. At Owen’s request letters and
journal that would have provided a clue were burned after his death. Despite living a long life and being both a
memoirist and the author of a thinly veiled autobiographic novel trilogy,
Sassoon never publicly acknowledged a physical relationship with Owen, although
he was open about other relationships.
Some
of the poems he worked out under the influence of Dr. Brock and Sassoon were the
first and only publication of his work during his life-time was in the hospital
magazine The Hydra
Sassoon
also introduced Owen to a wider literary world on the frequent outings from the
hospital—Sassoon’s close friend and Army comrade Robert Graves, Robert Ross,
H. G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett. Heady company indeed.
After
being discharged from the hospital in November 1917, Owen was posted to light
home duty at Scarborough. He maintained a correspondence with
Sassoon. He visited with other homosexual
literary figures via introductions from Sassoon including Oscar Wilde’s friend Robbie Ross, poet Osbert Sitwell, and C. K.
Scott-Moncrieff, the translator of Proust. There is circumstantial evidence that he
may have had a relationship with the latter who dedicated later work to Mr. O.W.
In
March of 1918 Owen was recovered enough to be assigned to the Northern Command Depot at Ripon to await re-assignment. During his months there he worked intensively
on some of the poems which would become the best known. He knew that he could easily get an
assignment in Britain or well behind the lines in France. But now, seeing a real career as a poet open
up before him, he began to ponder if he should get back into action to validate
his status as a war poet—perhaps, like Sassoon, even being decorated for gallantry
in action.
Sassoon
was violently opposed to Owen’s return to action writing him that he would “stab
him in the leg” to keep him out. But
Sassoon himself went back. After a brief
tour in Palestine, he was on the
front lines in France in July and almost immediately severely wounded in the head
in a friendly fire mishap.
In
the last days of August Owen returned to the front with the 2nd Manchesters. He was involved in heavy fighting in October
storming German strong points near
the village of village of Joncourt.
On
November 4 he fell in action.
Shortly
afterwards he received his belated Military
Cross citation for the action at Joncourt.
Back
in a British military hospital, it was not until months later that Sassoon
learned of his friend’s loss. He was devastated. But he also became obsessed with brining Owen’s
work to public attention.
After
the war Owen’s poetry was embraced by returning Tommies and the war weary public as a whole. He soon eclipsed Sassoon’s fame. He remained highly popular in Britain, if
less well known in the U.S. until World War II, when both the anti-war
sentiment and grim reality fell out of favor.
The British government, in fact, nearly erased Owen’s work from memory
as far as it was able fearing the effect on moral.
It
was not until the Ban the Bomb years
of the early 1960’s that Owen’s poetry began a revival. Composer Benjamin Britain would set several of
Owen’s poems to music in War Requiem, first performed for the
consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962.
Several
novelists and playwrights dealt with the relationship between Owen and Sassoon.
Here
is one of Owen’s most famous pieces. Still
not for the faint hearted after all of these years.
Dulce et Decorum
Est
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.
—Wilfred Owen
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