Cratered like the moon

We are two years into one declared war and six months into another one, with probably dozens of undeclared border incursions, terror attacks and sundry “incidents” having gone on for more than a decade. Which is to say, we do not live in a peaceful world and—like global warning—that’s down to homo sapiens.

Poets have been writing about war for millennia; since before writing, actually, when their poems were passed down the generations via song. Most of them through the ages have played up the nobility and valor of the warrior and the glory and wealth to be acquired in the practice of combat. They became propaganda for the tribes, societies and states they depicted as noble and brave—playing to the common folk more than the soldiers, who knew the truth and didn’t have much time for the dressed-up version.

(Same thing in the visual arts—paintings and sculptures wreathed in testosterone: spectacular and inspiring, and almost antiseptically clean.)

This held true pretty much until about a year or two into the First World War. Moving pictures were in their infancy, television was decades away and if you’d told anyone about mobile phones and social media they’d have locked you up. People at home depended on newspapers for information on how it was going; interestingly, poetry was a fairly regular element in coverage. Governments had a vested interest in shaping how it was reported.

World War I was the first conflict where all of the armies were conscripted (although Britain didn’t introduce the draft until 1916), so governments had a vested interest in portraying the war as a noble venture, sanctified by God and with a guaranteed victory by Christmas. By 1916, two years in, this was becoming increasingly difficult. If you, as a soldier, published anything that didn’t support the official line, you would be locked up. In prison, if you were without connections; in a looney bin, if you did.

Of course, you could end up in the latter anyhow; that’s how what we now know as PTSD was addressed. (At the time, mental breakdowns among the military were charitably called “shellshock”. When they weren’t called “lack of moral fiber”. Research in the past decade or so into PTSD suggests that it’s cause may actually literally be shellshock—as in traumatic brain injury.) The job of the mental hospital (just as any other military healthcare facility) was to patch you up enough so you could return to the front.

One such patient, at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, was Wilfred Owen. He was suffering from severe headaches probably from concussion(s), having been blown literally into the air by artillery strikes, but was diagnosed with shellshock in June 1917. While there, he met Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged his interest in poetry as a means of expression. Most of Owen’s poems were written in the year between Summer 1917 and his death in November 1918. Only three were published while he was alive.

In past years of National Poetry Month, I’ve given you “Dulce et Decorum est”, “Dreamers” and “Strange Meeting”. This time around it’s “The Show”, whose images seem like they would resonate with anyone in Ukraine or Gaza (or Syria or Sudan or…). It’s not for the faint of heart.

“The Show”

My soul looked down from a vague height with Death,
As unremembering how I rose or why,
And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth,
Gray, cratered like the moon with hollow woe,
And fitted with great pocks and scabs of plaques.
Across its beard, that horror of harsh wire,
There moved thin caterpillars, slowly uncoiled.
It seemed they pushed themselves to be as plugs
Of ditches, where they writhed and shrivelled, killed.
By them had slimy paths been trailed and scraped
Round myriad warts that might be little hills.

From gloom's last dregs these long-strung creatures crept,
And vanished out of dawn down hidden holes.

(And smell came up from those foul openings
As out of mouths, or deep wounds deepening.)

On dithering feet upgathered, more and more,
Brown strings towards strings of gray, with bristling spines,
All migrants from green fields, intent on mire.

Those that were gray, of more abundant spawns,
Ramped on the rest and ate them and were eaten.

I saw their bitten backs curve, loop, and straighten,
I watched those agonies curl, lift, and flatten.

Whereat, in terror what that sight might mean,
I reeled and shivered earthward like a feather.

And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.
And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid
Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,

Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,
And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.

©2024 Bas Bleu