‘down in the terraces between the targets’ ‘strategic bomber’.^16 Asthe dangers for the combatants delivering the weaponry
has diminished to all but zero (the ultimate case being nuclear submarine crews
with nowhere to return to after their mission), so the subject of war poetry has also
shifted. In the age of the long-range missile with nuclear warhead, there are military
men such as Lord Carver who have in effect agreed with Adorno that when human
conflict has reached such a state of self-alienation, we are all defenceless, and the
profession of arms is at an end.
Thereappeartobehardlyanyfamouspoemsabouttheairwarduringthe1914–18
conflict. The poets were mostly soldiers, and officers too. Again, Yeats would seem to
be an exception. His ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ bears some resemblances
to the mythologies that grew up around the air aces of the war—fighters whose
exploits could be accommodated into conventions derived from chivalric romance.
There are survivals of such thinking in the writings of Antoine de Saint-Exupery. ́^17
Robert Gregory, the tacit subject of the ‘Irish Airman’ poem, is praised in an elegy
for him as ‘Soldier, scholar, horseman, he’.^18 Here too his motivation and fate are
sketched in the most idealized of terms: ‘A lonely impulse of delight|Drove to this
tumult in the clouds.’^19 The airman is conceived as poetically detached, from those
he euphemistically kills and kill him, from those he defends, and even his country
and countrymen. The reasons for this can be intuited by comparing this work to
the uncollected ‘Reprisals’ in which Yeats, in his own voice, is directly critical of
the airman’s lack of interest in the fate of those left behind on the ground: ‘Half-
drunk or whole mad soldiery|Are murdering your tenants there.’^20 Though Yeats’s
airman poems are not principally aboutthatwar at all, being more concerned with
the survival of an Irish aristocratic family and its traditions, he nevertheless draws
attention to the dubious analogy between the air aces and chivalric honour codes,
to how such falsely applied codes conceal a failure of aristocratic responsibility
to the ordinary people below, and how, in short, flyers are likely to have to be
detached from the consequences of their actions down there on the ground. ‘Those
that I fight I do not hate,’ the airman ventriloquistically asserts—foreshadowing as
he does Adorno’s observation that ‘Consummate inhumanity is the realization of
Edward Grey’s humane dream, war without hatred.’^21
The most pressing reason for that detachment was, in the first place, survival.
Geoffrey Hill’s poem ‘To the Nieuport Scout’ depends for its imagistic pathos upon
(^16) See Theodor Adorno, ‘Uninformed Opinion’, inMinima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life,
trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), 107. 17
See Antoine de Saint-Exup ́ery,Pilote de guerre(1942), inOe u v r e s (Paris: Gallimard, 1959),
263–385.
(^18) Yeats, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, inPoems, 183.
(^19) Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’, ibid. 184.
(^20) Yeats, ‘Reprisals’, inThe Variorum Edition of the Poems, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach
(New York: Macmillan, 1971), 791.
(^21) Adorno, ‘Out of the firing-line’, inMinima Moralia, 56. Sir Edward Grey was the British Foreign
Secretary at the outbreak of the 1914–18 War.