Versed in the Horror of War

WAll Street Journal, Books & Ideas: Versed in the Horror of War
The first year of World War I, according to one German critic, produced something remarkable: 600,000 poems. Combatants and non-combatants alike were mobilized to put their feelings into words.

The British government held a secret meeting in London of eminent literary men, from Thomas Hardy to H. G. Wells, to persuade them to write patriotic poems and letters to the press. It was in the context of this war effort in words that Rupert Brooke produced his most famous lines: "If I should die, think only this of me. . . ."

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English poet and novelist Siegfried Sassoon
The Red Sweet Wine of Youth
By Nicholas Murray
Little, Brown, 352 pages, £25
But everybody knows what happens next—don't they? Brooke may still be thought of, from time to time, but it was his disillusioned successors, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, who would use verse to express their horror at the mechanized, inglorious slaughter of millions of their fellow soldiers, on the Western Front. And for Sassoon, the complacent approval of the war he encountered "back home" was the final twist of the knife: "For you our battles shine / With triumph half-divine," he wrote in "To the Warmongers," "But a curse is on my head . . .".

Nicholas Murray's new book concentrates on the lives of 12 of the best-known poets who fought in the First World War on the British side.

Several were wounded during active service on the Western Front. Some died in battle or not far behind the lines; others lived to tell the tale (in some cases, at great length and to the irritation of military historians). All will be familiar names from those popular anthologies of war poetry that have appeared so relentlessly over the past century (and in fact, a similarly biographical study appeared late last year, "Strange Meetings: The Poets of the Great War" by Harry Ricketts).

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Officer Cadet Wilfred Owen
"The Red Sweet Wine of Youth: The Brave and Brief Lives of the War Poets" is a book about "the impact of that war on the sensibility of the artist"; it also sets out to show that Sassoon et al were not necessarily antiwar but antiheroism, as in the mocking title of one of Wilfred Owen's most famous poems, "Dulce et Decorum Est." In their journals and letters, memoirs and verses, Owen and his fellow writers collectively show the scales falling from their eyes. Isaac Rosenberg could proclaim that "I never joined the army for patriotic reasons. . . . I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over," while an earlier victim of the war, Charles Hamilton Sorley, wrote that "There is no such thing as a just war. What we are doing is casting out Satan by Satan"—before he even got to France. These are words that echoes down the years to the present day. If there are no more soldier-poets—at least, there don't seem to be very many on active service in Iraq or Afghanistan—there are certainly those who have faced court martial for expressing similar views.

Mr. Murray quotes relatively little poetry in "The Red Sweet Wine of Youth," which is odd, given that when he does quote it, he has plenty of interesting things to say about it. He prefers prose, quoted at length.

Readers who would like to have a more detailed account of how this war changed poetic form and technique (Owen's innovative use of "pararhyme" being the most obvious example) will have to look elsewhere. Yet this is really at the heart of the matter. Would these poets still be widely read or highly regarded, in other words, if war was not their subject? I hope that they would be, and not just for what they express, but how they expressed it.

Perhaps over-reliant on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for certain minor details (that Sorley's posthumous collection of poems ran to six editions in its first year of publication, for instance, which it didn't) and turns of phrase, Mr. Murray's collective biography is in other ways a product of scrupulous industry. The author has visited poets' graves, consulted Sassoon's papers at the Imperial War Museum in London (an "exquisite refinement of torture"); he has drawn on the most up-to-date work on World War I and its poets. The result is a thoughtful and sometimes moving book. It seems unlikely that modern soldiers' tales (in prose), taking their cue and their tone from the collected works of Andy McNab, will produce a similar reverence in years to come.

—Mr. Caines works for the Times Literary Supplement, and recently edited an anthology about the 18th-century actor David Garrick.