peter robinson
the mother, murdered at her door,|Tocrawl in her own blood, and go scot-free’.^6
Not much tragic joy for the ‘mother, murdered’, it would seem; yet this is also
Yeats’s implication, for, as a later poet wrote about the Vietnam War, which did
involve the aerial bombardment of civilian populations, ‘all joy’ is ‘gone’.^7 One way
to dismiss Yeats’s comment is by attributing it to Maud Gonne’s silly Willy who
did not understand his times; but I prefer to credit the poet with a defensible point.
Death in itself is not the issue, nor is being killed. The poetry of war has to give
a meaning to the events it presents for attention. The meaning can’t simply be a
given, because then it will not be art. In poetry the occasion has to generate, or at
least convincingly appear to generate, its unique meaning. The difficulty with aerial
bombardment is that too many of the co-ordinates for evoking such significance
within the event would appear to be missing. By contrast, in Yeats’s example of the
‘scot-free’ soldiers, it is the breakdown of law and the punishment for murder that
give his occasion its anguished and angry sense.
During the twentieth century, focus shifted from the plight of badly led soldiers
in a technologically novel morass, to the consequences when military personnel are
relatively protected from danger, but various blunderers, including the institutions
of war-making themselves, have done their worst. In the cases I am considering,
it is not Tennyson’s 600 riding into the valley of death, though Yeats may even
have ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ in mind when he echoes ‘someone had
blundered’^8 with ‘some blunderer’. The ‘passivity’ of military personnel who obey
orders is a complex one, especially when death is the all but inevitable consequence.^9
The notion that civilians are bombed by accident, because they are not specifically
targeted, as may happen when military personnel are engaging each other, is one of
the polite fictions we allow. In strategic bombing the intention is usually to shock
and awe, spreading fear through inevitable, and thus tacitly discriminate, killing
of anyone who happens to be unluckily in the way.^10 The strategic argument that
shocking and awing civilian populations will lead to the collapse of the enemy’s
will to fight is, at best, unproven—and especially where a country’s leaders do not
(^6) Yeats, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, inPoems, 253.
(^7) Robert Lowell, ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’, inCollected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David
Gewinter (London: Faber, 2003), 386. For Lowell’s objection to the aerial bombardment of civilians, in
which he cites ‘the razing of Hamburg, where 200,000 non-combatants are reported dead’, see Lowell,
‘To President Roosevelt’, inCollected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (London: Faber, 1987), 367–70. For
a philosophical investigation of the moral questionsand judgements involved in the area bombing
of civilians during the Second World War, see A. C. Grayling,Among the Dead Cities(London:
Bloomsbury, 2006). Grayling takes the 1943 fire-bombing of Hamburg as his crucial example.
(^8) Alfred Tennyson, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, inThe Poems of Tennyson, ii, ed. Christopher
Ricks, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1987), 511–13.
(^9) Such passivity is addressed in Vittorio Sereni’s prose memoir about his war experiences, ‘Ventisei’.
For an English translation, ‘Twenty-six’, seeSelected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni,ed.andtrans.
Peter Robinson and Marcus Perryman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 375–87.
(^10) For the conclusion to the section on ‘Civilians’ in the US Strategic Bombing Survey (Europe) of
Sept. 1945, seehttp://www.anesi.com/ussbs02.htm