the poetry of pain fact, too, that a hiatus is taken, mid-epic, literally to clean the field of the dead, to
buryand burn the abandoned bodies, gives a sense of the narrative’s own stunned
and distraught reaction to the scale of its events. Or perhaps the notion of force is
best characterized by one of the text’s many images of the armies swept forwards
and backwards, like rushing water or swirling wind or stampeding herds—as the
similes so robustly convey—such as this one:
Now as these advancing came to one place and encountered,
they dashed their shields together and their spears, and the strength
of armoured men in bronze, and the shields massive in the middle
clashed against each other, and the sound grew huge of the fighting.
There the screaming and the shouts of triumph rose up together
of men killing and being killed, and the ground ran blood.
As when rivers in winter spate running down from the mountains
throw together at the meeting of the streams the weight of their water
outofthegreatspringsbehindinthehollowstream-bed,
and far away in the mountains the shepherd hears their thunder;
such, from the coming together of men, was the shock and the shouting.
(4. 446–56)The idea of force captures an essential feature of war literature, what we might
generalize as the experience of being swept up in a storm of violence. This storm
entails not only the individual’s helpless victimization, his bodily vulnerability, but
also the frenzied energy of combat, the lust to injure and kill one’s opponents, and,
in a quite different spirit, a kind of awed reverence for war’s sheer power.^19 As
we turn to modern war poetry, this conception of force will provide the pivotal,
defining quality, characterizing and at times enfolding the other Homeric features
I have outlined (anger and grief, the aesthetics of peace-in-war). By stressing the
centrality of force in modern renderings of war—a way of reading this material that
emphasizes, among other things, the body’s complete, often unimaginably painful
participation in combat, yet also acknowledges the crucial fact that the category
of force is ideologically neutral, encompassing reverence as much as abhorrence,
exultation along with victimization—I hope ultimately to suggest that Owen’s effort
‘for speechless sufferers to plain’ does, in fact, partially define the broad enterprise
of war writing. The imperative, that is, to make audible and visible war’s particular
forms of pain represents one rendering of the Homeric principle that war is force.
In Tim O’Brien’sThe Things They Carried, a work of fiction (as he calls it) which
is also very much a theorizing and reflection on the nature of war writing, O’Brien
gives a compelling description of something like the idea of force I am developing
here, and his account offers a helpful transition from Homer into modern war:
(^19) The subject of killing in war—its pleasures and seductions, its own ethics and aesthetics—has
arisen recently as a subject of scholarly interest, part of the revision of the Fussellian thesis of
war as victimization. See esp. Joanna Bourke,An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in
Twentieth-Century Warfare(London: Granta, 1999).