sarah cole
How do you generalize?
Waris hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and
adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and
love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war
makes you dead.
The truths are contradictory. It can be argued,for instance, that war is grotesque. But in
truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of
combat. You stare at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons.
You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You
admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape and
proportion, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination
rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket’s red glare.
It’s not pretty, exactly. It’s astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes,
but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or
bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference—a
powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the
truth is ugly.^20
Owen’s poem ‘Spring Offensive’ might be read as a poetic rendition of just
this kind of concession: a recognition that war is ‘astonishing’, and that for all
its destructive terror, it rivets the soldier with its ‘awful majesty of combat’ and
‘powerful, implacable beauty’. ‘Spring Offensive’ is a poem about the intimate
perception of war’s power, an attempt to capture first the sublimity of the pause-
in-war, in the Homeric sense, and later the form of wordless wonder that battle
engenders. In its opening lines, the poem establishes a particular time, place, and
mood: ‘Halted against a shade of a last hill|They fed, and eased of pack-loads, were
at ease;|And leaning on the nearest chest or knees|Carelessly slept.’^21 Ease (used
twice), carelessness, rest—as the regiment comes to its halt, it would seem to be
characterized by a deep repose, an almost animal unconcern (‘they fed’), but this
sense gives way immediately to a reflection on the aesthetics of the world at the
moment before battle:
But many there stood still
To face the stark blank sky beyond the ridge,
Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world.
Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled
By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge;
And though the summer oozed into their veins
Like an injected drug for their bodies’ pains,
Sharp on their souls hung the imminent ridge of grass,
Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass.
Hour after hour they ponder the warm field
And the far valley behind, where buttercups
(^20) Tim O’Brien,The Things They Carried(New York: Broadway Books, 1990), 86–7.
(^21) Owen, ‘Spring Offensive’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 192.