chapter 6
Going over the top: the passions of Wilfred Owen
What did Wilfred Owen feel about the First World War? If this sounds
like an easy question, the answer is not always as obvious as it might be:
So the church Christ was hit and buried
Under its rubbish and its rubble.
In cellars, packed-up saints lie serried,
Well out of hearing of our trouble.
One Virgin still immaculate
Smiles on for war to flatter her.
She’s halo’d with an old tin hat,
But a piece of hell will batter her.(‘Le Christianisme’)^1
Is the poem happy about such destruction, or not? Of course not: the war
has buried Christ, the gates of Hell are prevailing, and in flattering then
battering the immaculate Virgin, the war is linked with blasphemy, seduc-
tion and rape; Owen was attracted to Catholicism, despite (or because of )
his Evangelical upbringing. But then amid the destruction, the Virgin’s
very untouched nature leaves her looking slightly foolish, out of touch,
naı ̈ve, as if she couldn’t see the suggestion of ‘flatten’ lurking within
‘flatter’. The saints are similarly unworldly, lying ‘packed up’: safely stored
but also not working, as in ‘my machine gun’s packed up’. And they ‘lie
serried’ – lying down, or merely not telling the truth; serried, as in serried
ranks of angels, or serried files of soldiers. In other words, are their close
ranks a point of sympathy with the soldiers or an ironic comment? The next
line suggests irony, ‘well out of hearing of our trouble’, but then are the
saints too far away, or simply ‘well out of it’, mercifully spared our whining
prayers, or our guns? Is this poem angry at war’s destruction, or is it angry at
the way religion is so useless in war, and therefore tacitly siding with the
destruction? Whose is the ‘Christianisme’, the church’s or Owen’s?
Like the ruined church it describes, this poem is a site of conflict
between opposing appropriations, and like most contested territory, it
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