The realities of the war, then, were not simply overlaid by an organized cult of Remembrance (Cenotaph, Unknown Soldier, two minutes’ silence, poppies, etc.). Rather, our idea of the war, with its elaborately entwined, warring ideas of ‘myth’ and ‘reality’, was actively constructed through elaborately entwined, warring versions of memory in the decade and a half following the cessation of actual hostilities.
So it comes about that the war seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory than the way it would be remembered, that the war’s true subject is remembrance. Indeed the whole war — which was being remembered even as it was fought, whose fallen were being remembered before they fell — seems not so much to be tinted by retrospect as to have been fought retrospectively.
Owen’s famous preface insists that his ‘subject is War, and the pity of War’ (rather than honour or glory), but his subject might also be termed Memory, and the projection of Memory. His poetry redefines rather than simply undermines Binyon’s words (‘We will remember them’) which also work by projected retrospect. Despite their apparent inappropriateness Owen’s poems are now invisibly appended, like exquisitely engraved graffiti, to memorial inscriptions in honour of ‘The Glorious Dead’.
In Wanlockhead in north Dumfriesshire, the village memorial takes the form of a mourning soldier atop a marble plinth. Beneath the statue’s feet is written ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori’, a phrase whose meaning has been wrenched by Owen’s poem irrevocably away from the simplicity of the intended sentiment. The old lie has acquired a new ironic truth. By the time Sassoon concludes his 1933 poem ‘An Unveiling’, a mock-oration for London’s ‘War-gassed victims’, the Latin has been so Owenized as to render further satirical twisting superfluous.
Our bequest
Is to rebuild, for What-they-died-for’s sake,
A bomb-proof roofed Metropolis, and to make
Gas-drill compulsory. Dulce et Decorum est. .
R. H. Mottram hoped the Spanish Farm Trilogy might be seen as ‘a real Cenotaph, a true War memorial’; Richard Aldington wanted Death of a Hero to stand as ‘a memorial in its ineffective way to a generation’ — but it was only Owen who succeeded, as Sassoon, Blunden, Graves and the rest could not, in memorializing the war in the image of his work. The perfect war memorial — the one which best expresses our enduring memory of the war — would show men bent double, knock-kneed, marching asleep, limping, blind, blood-shod. Either that or — and it amounts to the same thing — it should be a statue of Owen himself.
Owen addressed the issue of his own legacy in ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, a poem which anticipates the time when it will stand as the response to its own appeaclass="underline" ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ Sassoon made a vital contribution here, substituting ‘Doomed’ for ‘Dead’ in an earlier draft so that his friend’s poem, like Binyon’s, is about those who are going to have died. Blunden wrote a poem entitled ‘1916 seen from 1921’ — Owen had written a dozen poems like that four years earlier.
The final line of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ refers to the custom of drawing down household blinds as a sign of mourning — of displaying loss — but it is also a disquieting image of concealment, of the larger process whereby the state and the military hid their culpability from scrutiny. These blinds stayed firmly down until Cabinet papers and War Office records became available to researchers in the sixties. Only in the last couple of years, however, have we learnt how Haig, for example, in another telling instance of the way the war seems to have been fought retrospectively, systematically rewrote his diary to make his intentions accord with — and minimize his responsibility for — what actually resulted from his command. Denis Winter, whose controversial endeavours have cast damaging light on the way the state colluded in perpetuating Haig’s preferred version of events, concludes that ‘the official record of the war — political as well as military — [was] systematically distorted both during the war as propaganda and after it, in the official history’. The amount of material he has unearthed in Canadian and Australian archives also emphasizes how effectively documents passed on to the Public Record Office in Britain had been ‘vetted so as to remove those which contradicted the official line’. Even when the blinds are raised, the sudden rush of light reveals how much is — and will remain — concealed, missing.
Winter’s obsessive scrutiny of the Haig records and their incriminating gaps has destroyed the last shreds of Haig’s reputation; with Owen a similar process has been under way in the opposite direction. His manuscripts have been scrutinized by Jon Stallworthy so that almost every variant of every line is now available. The work of no British poet of this century has been more thoroughly posthumously edited and preserved or, despite Yeats famously excluding him from the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (on the grounds that ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’), more widely anthologized. In the twenties Haig’s reputation was embalmed in an official vacuum of secrecy; likewise, nothing was known of Owen’s life or his development as a poet. In his 1920 edition of Owen’s poems Sassoon declared that aside from the poems any ‘records of [Owen’s] conversation, behaviour or appearance, would be irrelevant and unseemly’. Until Blunden’s edition — which included a memoir and what have since become well-known extracts from the letters — he seemed, in Philip Larkin’s phrase, ‘almost a spirit called into being by the Great War’s unprecedented beastliness to assert compassion and humanity’. His poems ‘existed for some ten years in a vacuum, as if they were utterances of The Spirit of the Pities in some updated The Dynasts’.8
In the early twenties everything about the war — except the scale of loss — was suspended in a vacuum which all the memorials and rites of Remembrance were in the process of trying, in different ways, to fill. Husbands, sons, fathers were missing. Facts were missing. Everywhere the overwhelming sense was of lack, of absence. Overwhelmingly present was ‘the pall of death which hung so sorrowful, stagnant and static over Britain’.
To a nation stunned by grief the prophetic lag of posthumous publication made it seem that Owen was speaking from the other side of the grave. Memorials were one sign of the shadow cast by the dead over England in the twenties; another was a surge of interest in spiritualism. Owen was the medium through whom the missing spoke.
They are going to have died: this is the tense not only of the poems of Owen (who carried photos of the dead and mutilated in his wallet) but also of photographs from the war. Although he was thinking only of photographs, both are, in Roland Barthes’ phrase, ‘prophecies in reverse’. With this in mind, like Brodsky contemplating photographs of Auden, ‘I began to wonder whether one form of art was capable of depicting another, whether the visual could apprehend the semantic.’
It is difficult, now, to imagine the Great War in colour. Even contemporary poems like Gurney’s ‘Pain’ depict the war in monochrome:
Grey monotony lending
Weight to the grey skies, grey mud where goes
An army of grey bedrenched scarecrows in rows. .
‘I again work more in black and white than in colour,’ Paul Klee noted on 26 October 1917. ‘Colour seems to be a little exhausted just now.’ Many photographs — like those from the first day of the Somme — were taken under skies of Kodak blue, but, even had it been available, colour film would — it seems to us — have rendered the scenes in sepia. Coagulated by time, even fresh blood seems greyish brown.