‘downintheterracesbetweenthetargets’ recognize complaints about the plight of civilians as anything other than treason.
The‘blunderer’ who lets his bombs fall where they will, even when aiming as best
he can, may appear to be doing his job.
William Empson, whose eldest brother had been killed in an RFC flying accident
before the Great War, went to prep school at Folkstone in 1915, and so must be
among the first British poets to have experienced air raid warnings (the school
master’s whistle) and dashes for a bomb shelter.^11 Some twenty years later he
commented on Japanese bombings of China in ‘Autumn on Nan-Yueh’ (1938), a ̈
poem with Yeats as its presiding genius:
So far I seem to have forgot
About the men who really soar.
We think about them quite a bit;
Elsewhere there’s reason to think more.
With Ministers upon the spot
(Driven a long way from the War)
And training camps, the place is fit
For bombs. The railway was the chore
Next town. The thing is, they can not
Take aim. Two hundred on one floor
Were wedding guests cleverly hit
Seven times and none left to deplore.^12‘The thing is, they can not|Take aim’: in notes on the poem John Haffenden
prints two related prose passages by the author. In the first he observes that ‘the
Japanese give one of their chivalrous announcements that they mean to give the
railway a thorough bombing’. Elsewhere Empson reported a conversation with
some British Air Force men in Hong Kong concerning the fact that ‘Month
after month went by and still the Japanese airmen couldn’t get a bomb on the
bridges’. Their response is reported as: ‘ ‘‘It’s disgusting. They’re letting the whole
show down.’’ The Show was the profession of bombing, in which they were
engaged.’^13 We can differentiate disgusts here. The profession of bombing in itself
might prompt revulsion and horror, let alone inept bombing. Yet it could be said
that if the ability to aim effectively allows aerial bombardment to contribute to
attacks on enemy positions, or the destruction of infrastructure without civilian
casualties, it is attempting to preserve the profession of arms from inroads upon
military traditions of the politically motivated concept of total war. Empson’s
poem, whatever the fig-leaves of ‘chivalrous announcements’, versifies, in a blankly
dismayed style, the consequences for a civilian wedding of those pilots’ inability
(^11) See John Haffenden,William Empson,i:Among the Mandarins(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), 67.
(^12) William Empson, ‘Autumn on Nan-Y ̈ueh’, inTheCompletePoems, ed. John Haffenden (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 2001), 95. 13
Empson, quoted in ‘Notes’, ibid. 391 and 392.