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 peter robinson

beingpubliclyacknowledgedcanbeambiguouslyblurredintheappropriation.Does
thememorialization of military sacrifice truly contribute to the arts of peace, or
does it serve as a tacit justification for continued use of force to protect our interests
via the arts of war? The recollection of civilian casualties may be less ambiguous;
or, rather, it may be less easy to see the political advantage in remembering some
randomly scattered unlucky deaths that, far from occasioning the acknowledgement
of our heroic endeavours in the field, serve rather to draw attention to the limits
of governmental concern with the conditions of its civilian populations. Kerr
concludes his essay by citing Roy Fuller’s ‘Soliloquy in an Air-Raid’:

Ordered this year:

A billion tons of broken glass and rubble,

Blockage of chaos, the other requisites

For the reduction of Europe to a rabble.^70

As this reaching for an apt quotation underlines, it may well be in works surviving
in collections and anthologies to one side of the official culture of memorialization
that words which helpfully attempt to integrate truth and remembrance may be
found. The difficulties of memorialization as also demonstrated by war poetry in
relation to the bombing of civilians have been directly linked to what has been
called ‘the death of meaning’.^71 Yet this slogan too may be a form of enactive
fatalism that achieves by its recognition what the technology it protests against had
haphazardly produced. Rather, what mechanized and technologized total war and
its ambiguous relationship to mass democracy have done is put to death one idea
of heroic or tribal meaning. It has done nothing to reduce or destroy, and it may
even have emphasized, by contrast, the meanings generated by civilians themselves
in the attempted continuance of their daily lives.
As we have seen, the poetry of aerial bombardment had to confront difficulties
created by the lack of key elements in early twentieth-century war poetry. These
might be summed up by the fact that the protagonists are even more separated
than Yeats’s blunderer in his car and the victim who is hit by it. Roy Fisher’s
poem ‘The Entertainment of War’ is a significant document, not least because it
explores an experience of these missing elements. As in the verse from Empson’s
poem of the Sino–Japanese War, ‘Autumn on Nan-Yueh’, since there are neither ̈
survivors nor witnesses, the people seem absent from their own deaths. None of
the victims’ fates are experienced, and there is no enemy at all. An aunt, an uncle,
two cousins, and ‘a woman from next door’ have been killed in an air raid on
Birmingham:

(^70) Roy Fuller, ‘Soliloquy in an Air-Raid’, in Charles Hamblett (ed.),I Burn for England: An Anthology
of the Poetry of World War Two(London: Leslie Frewin, 1966), 131.
(^71) See Kerr, ‘Uncompleted Monument’, 75–8.