the poetry of pain Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up;
Wheneven the little brambles would not yield
But clutched and clung to them like sorrowing arms.
They breathe like trees unstirred.Paul Fussell and other critics have stressed the motif, in British First World War
writing, of a nostalgic reverence for the pastoral English landscape.^22 But what
‘Spring Offensive’ insists is that the landscape is coded entirely by war, where the
tramping boots are not so much intruders as the defining features of the flowered
fields, and where the familiar—those English ‘buttercups’, the ‘May breeze’—is
rendered not only unfamiliar, or ‘uncanny’ in Freudian terms, but ‘mysterious’
also in a religious sense. This is not a landscape of nostalgia but of war’s own
strange beauty, whose vibrancy andvitality is generated by the hyper-presence
of its very nemesis, death. The sensorium is activated in this awe-filled universe,
the body itself is the receptacle of the energy that circulates in an atmosphere
defined by violence (yet here supplicating and yielding to the soldier). After the
pause, when the ‘upsurge’ comes, when the men race over the hill ‘Exposed’, this
mood of majestic wait becomes the crash of force: ‘And instantly the whole sky
burned|With fury against them; earth set sudden cups|In thousands for their
blood; and the green slope|Chasmed and deepened sheer to infinite space.’ Like
the cups that rush to catch the soldiers’ blood, Owen’s language breathlessly works
to capture the incomparable sense of those who ‘breasted the surf of bullets’, to
reach with words towards the horror of combat in its full, burning excess. In
a final crescendo of survival, ‘there out-fiending all its fiends and flames|With
superhuman inhumanities’, the men who have somehow remained alive crawl
‘slowly back’, ‘regain[ing] cool peaceful air in wonder’, the sheer other-worldliness
of their experience destroying the possibility of communication. If Owen concludes
with a question about this silence—‘Why speak not they of comrades that went
under?’—the thrust of the poem has been, in a sense, to suggest that only silence
can follow from the soldiers’direct reckoning with force.
‘Spring Offensive’ represents a particularly layered reflection on the nature of
force in war, stressing, as it does, the ferocity of battle, as well as the moment of
pause, the awe-inspiring immensity of war’s reach, and the quality of beauty in all
of this; but it is only one among a great number of war poems that zero in on some
aspect of these features of war. Randall Jarrell’s ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’
(1945), a poem that differs in almost every respect from Owen’s, can also be said to
reflect on force; indeed, its ironic voice-from-the-dead becomes a very precise and
jarring emblem of the body obliterated by war. In its entirety, the poem reads:
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.(^22) See Paul Fussell,The Great War and Modern Memory(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975),
esp. ch. 7, ‘Arcadian Resources’.