treading blood, or the gorier moments of vengeance in the Old Testament
(Psalms 58 : 10 , Isaiah 63 : 2 – 4 ) where the feet are those of the righteous but
the blood is always the enemy’s. And the question of agency resounds for
Owen too, who, in being too late to help the dying man, must watch him
again and again. The exclamatory punctuation of ‘Gas! GAS! Quick, boys
- An ecstasy of fumbling’ insists the line has seven stresses, one on each of
the first four words, making it both ultra-urgent and weirdly suspended
from the time-frame of the pentameter, in a temporal ekstasis. This
dislocation of time in the attack is reproduced in the shift from past tense
(‘I saw him drowning’) to the perpetual present (‘he plunges’) of the dreams.
The agency of ‘plunges’ is, exactly, both active and passive; the soldier
‘plunges’ because he is drowning in the green sea of gas, because he is trying
to breathe (OED: ‘of the chest: to expand with falling of the diaphragm’),
but also as if he were a kind of missile (OEDagain: ‘of artillery: to send shot
downwards from a higher level’), and the ‘at’ gives the man’s fall a kind of
accusation. Such an accusation is picked up in the couplet about
‘smothering dreams’, where the dying man is ‘guttering’, a word which
brilliantly combines candles going out and sewage spilling out. For Owen’s
dreams are also asphyxiating, like the gas, as if his guilty conscience has
allied itself with the enemy’s poison, smotheringhimfor being too late to
help the soldier. Whose side is Owen on?
‘I came out in order to help these boys – directly by leading them as
only an officer can – indirectly by watching their sufferings that I may
speak of them as well as a pleader can’.^4 The difficulty is not just that these
two aims are in conflict with one another, but that they are done by the
same person: the officer leading his men into suffering and the watcher of
that suffering are inextricable from one another. Hence one of the tasks in
reading Owen’s poetry is not only to see what it says about the war, but
what it says about its own situation of saying, for the two cannot be
separated. Determining that is an altogether trickier affair than reading
Owen as simply an anti-war prophet. A letter to his non-combatant
cousin Leslie Gunston regrets that ‘you are neither in the flesh with us
nor in the spirit against War’, implying a similar split between body and
soul in himself.^5 Owen was an anti-war protester who was awarded the
Military Cross for spraying a trenchful of Germans with machine-gun
fire.^6 ‘All a poet can do today is warn’, Owen writes in his famous
projected Preface, but then adds: ‘(If I thought the letter of this book
would last, I might have used proper names; but if the spirit of it survives - survives Prussia – my ambition and those names will have achieved
fresher fields than Flanders.)’ After denouncing all notions of the glory
The passions of Wilfred Owen 185