Apr

17

War. What Is It Good For?

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

April 17, 2007 |

World War I caused a major shift in the consciousness of Western civilization, possibly even global civilization, and such shifts are always best represented in art. The literature of World War I includes the bitter, occasionally harsh, poetry of poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and of course Wilfred Owen, who was killed a week before Armistice Day. After World War I the poet Paul Eluard and the artist Max Ernst became best friends. Ernst remarked that, during World War I, they’d been three-hundred feet apart and shooting at each other. There was also the “Lost Generation”, so named by Gertrude Stein, which consisted of writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf.

Wilfred Owen is, of course, best known for his poem Dulce Et Decorum Est, which is the first part of a line from the Latin poet Horace which translates as, “It is sweet and beautiful to die for one’s country.” Owen ends his poem with the Latin lines, but turns them on their head:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Robert Graves, who lived to see several more wars, also wrote a poem about how we pass war on to the next generation, although his poem, The Next War, is addressed directly to children:

You young friskies who today
Jump and fight in Father’s hay
With bows and arrows and wooden spears,
Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers,
Happy though these hours you spend,
Have they warned you how games end?

Ruins

The Vietnam War caused a similar shift in consciousness, at least for Americans. Robert Mason’s novel Chickenhawk (Viking Press, 1983) has given us a word for someone who wants war but who’s too cowardly to go–which applies to a lot of our politicians. Poets also came out of the Vietnam War, including Bruce Weigl, whose books The Monkey Wars (University of Georgia Press, 1985) and What Saves Us (TriQuarterly Books, 1992) reflect on his Vietnam experience. The Pulizter-prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa went to Vietnam a journalist but came back a poet.

Will the current conflict change us at all? I think it already has. Torture, which used to be something only the enemy did, has become standard operating procedure. The definition of victory used to be when the troops came home. Now that’s the definition of defeat. And wars can now be fought for any reason, or no reason at all, by politicians who are not only chickenhawks but war profiteers. I worry that we’re a civilization teetering on the brink of illiteracy. Literature, because it’s both more concise and more personal, can tell us more about history than the rote repetition of dates and locations, but we not only haven’t learned from the literature of previous wars, there may not be anyone writing the literature of this one.

Here are a few more lines from Graves’ The Next War:

Wars don’t change except in name;
The next one must go just the same,
And new foul tricks unguessed before
Will win and justify this War.


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. James on April 17, 2007 10:09 am

    Graves and Chickenhawk in the same breath (almost). I like the relationship. Both Graphic, both question the idea of why we go to war, both came out of wars that did change the consciousness of a people. Both also show a levity, a looking glass, that helps the reader realise that war is not about glory and heroes, but, as you look through that facade, that it is about death, destruction, and the return home when you are forever changed. They show the facade and walk you through it and back out the other side.

    A good piece here. I enjoyed reading it.

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