Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will fade into night
Ere their story die.This poem, Hardy says, was prompted by farm workers he saw in Cornwall in 1870
during the Franco-Prussian War, but he ‘did not write the verses till during the war
with Germany of 1914’. Hardy was thus a war poet; as was Kipling, who lost his son,
and wrote a sombre set of Epitaphs of the War. The 1914–18 war is a major subject
of Pound’s poetry from 1915 and of Eliot’s The Waste Land. Eliot said that Ford’s
‘Antwerp’ was the only good poem he had met with on the subject of the war.
War Poetry was not invented in 1915. It begins with Homer’s Iliad, and includes
Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V. One of the most popular Russian poems is a
version of Wolfe’s ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna’. It is too often
imagined in Britain that war poetry begins with the trench-poetry of young
combatants, notably Siegfried Sassoon(1886–1967),Wilfred Owen(1893–1918),
Isaac Rosenberg(1890–1918) and Edward Thomas(1878–1917).Accounts which
focus on anti-war poems usually employ Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) as a foil.
Like most volunteers, Brooke had welcomed the war in a spirit of patriotic ideal-
ism:‘If I should die, think only this of me,/ That there’s some corner of a foreign
field/ That is forever England’ (‘The Soldier’). After his death on the way to
Gallipoli, the handsome young Brooke was held up as a symbolic type of the
myriad of young officers lost in the war. After the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the
losses of the tre nches blighted the idea of heroic sacrifice. Poems such as Sassoon’s
‘The General’, Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, Rosenberg’s ‘Break of Day in
the Tre nches’, and ‘To His Love’ by Ivor Gurney immerse us in that stalemate in the
mud for which the army was unprepared. The last battle anywhere near Britain
had been Waterloo in 1815. The poems of Sassoon and Owen came to the fore
after 1918, and came to express national mourning. The outraged sense that the
pr ecious wastage of the trenches must not be forgotten gave a symbolic value to
Sassoon’s savagely effective protest verse and to Owen’s telling pathos. Both men
returned to the front, Owen to die; Sassoon survived, to write his prose Memoirs
ofa Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930).Many
schoolchildren have written English essays on First World War poetry saying that
war is futile, and History essays on the Second World War saying that Hitler had
to be resisted.
In 1914 verse was still a natural medium for the expression of public feelings; the
newspapers printed many patriotic poems. Survivors also wrote prose about the
war: the novel Death of a Hero, by Richard Aldington (1892–1962), and the memoir
Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves (1895–1985), both 1929. The ‘home front’ is
commemorated in the popular Testament of Youth (1933), by Vera Brittain
(1893–1970).Ofthe scores of books about the war, the account by the poet Edmund
Blunden (1896–1974) of going to the front inUndertones of War(1928) should be
read with In Parenthesis(1937) by David Jones (1895–1974) and Ford’s No More
Parades (1924–8).
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