jonstallworthy
In the clean hospital bed, my eyes were so heavy
Sleepeasily blotted out one ugly picture,
A wounded militiaman moaning on a stretcher,
Now out of danger, but still crying for water,
Strong against death, but unprepared for such pain.
This on a quiet front.^4Cornford’s ‘Letter from Aragon’, like Owen’s memory of the Somme, persuades
us that it is true, shocking, and a call for action. The soldier’s fury builds in his
refrain, the repeated echo of the Great War’s most famous book title,All Quiet on
the Western Front, and the reference to poison gas offers another link to Owen’s
poem. Cornford’s coda, hismoralitas, is again a direct address to his reader:
But when I shook hands to leave, an Anarchist worker
Said: ‘Tell the workers of England
This was a war not of our own making
We did not seek it.
But if ever the Fascists again rule Barcelona
It will be as a heap of ruins with us workers beneath it.’Cornford did not leave Spain. He was killed on his twenty-first birthday, or the day
after, in the battle for Madrid.
As many people had foreseen, the Spanish Civil War proved to be the curtain-
raiser for a second World War. It is a truth universally acknowledged, as Jane
Austen would say, that, unlike the First World War, the Second produced no poetry
of importance. This truth is no more truthful than the one mocked by Austen or
that attacked by Owen as ‘the old Lie’. There are wonderful, terrible poems of the
later war, too little known on this side of the Atlantic because half are American;
too little known in America because half are British.
To illustrate this point, my thirdexemplumis an American poem as strong—as
pity-full, as furious—as any by Owen or Sassoon: Louis Simpson’s ‘The Heroes’.
Simpson served with a glider-infantry regiment of the 101st Airborne Division in
France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany. In combat he was a runner. He carried
messages. In Holland he was wounded by a shell, and at Bastogne his feet were
frost-bitten; but he survived. After the War, however, he had a nervous breakdown
and was taken into hospital suffering from amnesia. The War was blacked out in
his mind, as were episodes in his lifebeforetheWar.Whenhewasdischargedfrom
hospital, he found that he could hardly read or write. In a contributor’s note to an
anthology, Simpson says:
Before the war I had written a few poems and some prose. Now I found that poetry was the
only kind of writing in which I could express my thoughts. Through poems, I could release
(^4) John Cornford, ‘Letter from Aragon’, inUnderstand the Weapon, Understand the Wound: Selected
Writings of John Cornford, ed. Jonathan Galassi (Manchester: Carcanet, 1976), 41. H.E. is High
Explosive.