peter robinson
It is worth noting, in this light, the degree to which the modes of war poetry are
shapedby perceptions of a war’s justification and outcome—even when the civilian
populations of countries bombarded can barely be held accountable for either the
declaration of war or the means by which it is conducted. The shames of being
on the side of the unjustified aggressor, or of suffering unimaginable defeat, or the
modern criminalizing of the defeated in war trialswill inevitably leave marks on
the war poetry of their surviving civilians and children. This is affectingly true of
Peter Huchel’s expressive poem spoken in the voice of a German pastor lamenting
the destruction of his parish in a fire-storm.^32
While touching on poetry from the viewpoint of pilots and aircrews, I have been
tacitly outlining what some civilian-related poems had to struggle with in order to
count as war poetry. Combatants have a more focused sense of risk and danger.
They can know their enemy and love him as themselves—or not. Being in military
units, they have the support of comradeship and the attendant possibilities for
specific mourning of individuals killed in action. This is even true, for example, of
Mairi MacInnes’s two mature poems occasioned by the death in a flying accident
of her pilot love. She was serving in the WRENS at the time of her loss.^33 Poet-
combatants who survive may be equipped with narrative memories and roles as
involved witnesses. But as Empson noted in his poem about the Chinese bombed
at a wedding, when there are no survivors, no witnesses, and no mourners, poetry
has little ground upon which to locate itself. Yeats’s words in the introduction to
his anthology were to keep the Great War poets out of his book; and yet, looking
back, it was just those excluded poets who had set the mould for what war poetry
would be taken to be. In the case of aerial bombardment, in which cities are beaten
flat, it is as if all there can be is anonymous death and hysterically weeping women.
However, despite the accelerating shift from the suffering of the fighting forces
to that of the civilian populations, the place of civilian death in war is still an
anomalous one. Being non-combatants, their deaths are not always counted as
losses, or necessarily remembered on memorials. Their helplessness makes them
prone to being used for artistic protests; their contribution to such protests is
as providers of graphic spectacle. Yeats’s anthology appeared in the year that the
Spanish Civil War broke out. This was the war that gave us the first of the series of
names synonymous with the discriminate bombing of civilians: Guernica. At the
(^32) Peter Huchel, ‘Bericht des Pfarrers vom Untergang seiner Gemainde’ (‘The Vicar’s Report
on the Destruction of his Parish’), in Patrick Bridgewater (ed.),Twentieth-Century German Verse
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 220–2. For an English poem on this subject, see James Fenton, ‘A
German Requiem’, inThe Memory of War and Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1983(Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1983), 9–19.
(^33) See Mairi MacInnes, ‘The Old Naval Airfield’ and ‘Passion’, inThe Pebble: Old and New Poems
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 35–6 and 106–7. For her generation’s
‘memory of bombs’, see MacInnes, ‘Hardly Anything Bears Watching’ (ibid. 13–14). MacInnes’s
wartime recollections are inClearances: A Memoir(New York: Pantheon, 2002), 52–74.