war poetry and the realm of the senses done. Only there were no anaesthetics—no time—no money—no staff for that. So after
thatscene I need not fear to see the creepiest operations. One poor devil had his shin-bone
crushed by a gun-carriage-wheel, and the doctor had to twist it about and push it like a
piston to get out the pus. Another had a hole right through the knee; and the doctor passed
a bandage thus:
Another had a head into which a ball had entered and come out again.
Thisis how the bullet lay inthe zouave. Sometimes the feet were covered with a brown, scaly,
crust—dried blood.
I deliberately tell you all this to educate you to the actualities of the war.^33
The letter is marked by qualities we usually associate with Owen’s verse—realism,
pity, writing as testimony—but at the same time, there is a complete absorption
with the body in pain. More disturbingly, there is also a narrativejouissanceas
distended body parts are evolved into child-like sketches or verbal witticism: ‘push
it like a piston to get out the pus’.
Both the drawings and the alliteration, however, go back to Owen’s pre-war letters
which dwell obsessively on illness and pain: lumps on the gum, headache, impaired
vision, granulated pharynx, sore throat, boils on the neck, fever, or ‘a most dervishy
vertigo’.^34 Repressed homoeroticism, coupled with a rigorous Protestant ethic, may
partly explain what Harold Owen calls his brother’s ‘morbid absorption’ in his own
health in his youth.^35 Thus, in ‘Lines Written on my Nineteenth Birthday’, a bout
(^33) Owen to Harold Owen, 23 Sept. 1914, inCollected Letters, 285.
(^34) Owen to Mary Owen, 16 Nov. 1912, ibid. 169.
(^35) Harold Owen,Journey from Obscurity, i (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 161.