mark rawlinson
duty.^25 Owen’sdeath, during an offensive crossing of the Oise-Sambre canal a week
before the Armistice, was read from the start as a terminal irony of war, potent
enough to help obscure a now ‘forgotten victory’.^26
At the end of April 1917, more than a week after his battalion of the Manchesters
had been taken out of the line, Owen was dispatched to a Casualty Clearing Station
specializing in the treatment of shell-shock (using William Brown’s abreaction
therapy.)^27 EvacuatedacrosstheChannelinJune,OwenwasboardedunfitforHome
Service and transferred to Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh. His treatment there
by the ‘ergotherapist’ A. J. Brock continued until the end of October. Brock urged
Owen to write, and inHealth and Conduct(1923) he offered one of the earliest
commentaries on the ‘war poems’ as a literal mastering of ‘the phantoms of the
mind’.^28
At the end of January 1918 Owen was boarded for light duties, but he was not
posted to the vast Northern Command Depot at Ripon until March, days before
Ludendorff’s break-out from the Hindenberg Line. A letter to his mother Susan
at the beginning of October represents France as the elective destiny of the vatic
poet: ‘I came out in order to help these boys—directly by leading them as well as
an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as
well as a pleader can.’^29 But while Field Marshal Haig’s ‘backs to the wall’ Order
of the Day for April 11—‘each one of us must fight on to the end’^30 —made a
return to France seemingly inevitable, Owen continued to pursue the possibility
of home postings which would dramatically increase his chances of surviving the
war to fulfil his poetic ambitions. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, a new friend from Robert
Ross’s Poetry Book Shop circle, and the future translator of Proust, was employed
at the War Office, whence he had helped get Robert Graves a ‘safe’ posting in
Wales. Now a published poet, Owen also sought to build on his first contacts in
metropolitan literary society. A note titled ‘Projects.(May 5. 1918. Ripon)’ maps
out a future including ‘blank-verse plays on old Welsh themes’, a return to the
‘invented mythology’ of a work in progress titledPerseus, and a collection of the
juvenilia from which, it has often been claimed, the war had cut him free. As James
Fenton notes, this plan wrecks the received story, the ‘handy teleologies, which
would have led us to construct an Owen shocked into the twentieth century by the
war’.^31
(^25) See Dominic Hibberd,Wilfred Owen: A New Biography(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002),
p. xvii.
(^26) Dan Todman,The Great War: Myth and Memory(London: Hambledon, 2005), 173.
(^27) For an account of the rival therapies and the management of ‘shell-shock’, see Ben Shephard,A
War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914–1994(London: Jonathan Cape, 2001).
(^28) A. J. Brock, quoted in Hibberd,Wilfred Owen, 254–5.
(^29) Owen to Susan Owen, 4/5 Oct. 1918, inCollected Letters, 580.
(^30) Field Marshal Haig, quoted in Gary Sheffield,Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and
Realities(London: Review, 2002), 229; Hibberd,Wilfred Owen, 314.
(^31) Fenton,Strength of Poetry, 37.