All Glory Gone? Poets and the Changing Face of Warfare

The war to end all wars ushered in drastic changes to art and poetry. “Gassed,” 1919, by John Singer Sargent. Imperial War Museum London. (Public Domain)

“Only the dead are safe; only the dead have seen the end of war.” So wrote philosopher George Santayana (1863–1952) in “Tipperary,” an essay found in his collection “Soliloquies in England, and Later Soliloquies.” In “Tipperary,” Santayana rebukes those pacifists and dreamers who believe that World War I was the war to end all wars:

“You suppose that this war has been a criminal blunder and an exceptional horror; you imagine that before long reason will prevail, and all these inferior people that govern the world will be swept aside, and your own party will reform everything and remain always in office. You are mistaken. This war has given you your first glimpse of the ancient, fundamental, normal state of the world, your first taste of reality. It should teach you to dismiss all your philosophies of progress or of a governing reason as the babble of dreamers who walk through one world mentally beholding another.”

The century that has passed since Santayana wrote these words offers a grim and bloody confirmation of their truth. Millions upon millions of dead, slaughtered by war or by the political caprice and bigotry of their own governments, are the mile markers of the 20th century. Even today, about 30 countries are at war or fighting with arms around the globe.

Also providing evidence that this is “the ancient, fundamental, normal state of the world” are the poets of the last 3,000 years.

A Long Look Back

"The New Oxford Book of War Poetry" charts war from ancient times to the 21st century.

Edited by professor John Stallworthy (1935–2014), “The New Oxford Book of War Poetry” takes readers from the battlefields of the ancient world up to the dawn of the 21st century. This anthology is 448 pages long and contains 292 poems, some of which are selections from much longer pieces, like the epics of Homer and Virgil and “In Parenthesis” by British poet David Jones.

In his Introduction, Stallworthy notes the fundamental shift in the poetic perspectives on battle and military glory in the last two centuries. “So long as warrior met warrior in equal combat with sword or lance,” he writes, “poets could celebrate their courage and chivalry, but as technology put ever-increasing distance between combatants and, then, ceased to distinguish between combatant and civilian, poets more and more responded to ‘man’s inhumanity to man.’”

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We might quibble about this separation of warriors and civilians. In ancient warfare, for example, many a city that had fallen to an enemy would be sacked and its civilian population—old men, women, and children—either killed or enslaved. Conflicts like Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) devastated entire populations and left their fields and farms in ruin.

In every war, civilians suffered as well as soldiers. “Soldiers Plundering a Farm During the Thirty Years' War,” by Sebastian Vrancx. (PD-US)

Making War en Masse

Overall, Stallworthy is on target. The replacement of sword-and-horse battlefield glory by such weapons as machine guns, aerial bombs, and napalm changed the perspectives of poets on war. In the 20th century, poets for the most part have avoided dressing battlefield exploits in such decorative prose and emotions. Instead, we get poems like “Anthem for Doomed Youth” by Wilfred Owen, killed in action just a week before the end of World War I. Here is that poem’s opening verse:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? — Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,— The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

In his 1925 essay “Mass Effects in Modern Life,” Winston Churchill marked this change with this observation: “The heroes of modern war lie out in the cratered fields, mangled, stifled, scarred; and there are too many of them for exceptional honours. It is mass suffering, mass sacrifice, mass victory.”

“Paths of Glory,” 1917, by C.R.W. Nevinson. Imperial War Museums, London. (PD-US)

Voices From America

In Stallworthy’s collection, American poets follow this same transition. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn,” honoring those Americans who had fired some of the first shots of the Revolutionary War, speaks of the spirit “that made those heroes dare/ To die, and leave their children free.” Originally written as a poem, Julia Ward Howe’s idealistic song “Battle Hymn of the Republic” helped lead Union armies to victory in the Civil War.

The Oxford war book then reflects the shift from such poems to those focused more on war’s gritty realities. “The Wound-Dresser” by Walt Whitman, who worked in a military hospital for part of the war, tells of treating the maimed and dying, often with such precise descriptions like this one: “From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,/ I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and the blood.” Herman Melville’s “The College Colonel” tells of a crippled young officer arriving home at the head of his battered regiment.

A still rigidity and pale— An Indian aloofness lones his brow; He has lived a thousand years Compressed in battle’s pains and prayers, Marches and watches slow.

With 20th-century American poets, however, this mood changes much more drastically. Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” tells of the savage impersonality of mass warfare as described by Churchill:

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Louis Simpson, who saw action with the 101st Airborne in World War II, respects the dignity of the men with whom he served but also records the costs of combat even to the living, as in “The Battle”:

Most clearly of the battle I remember The tiredness in eyes, how hands looked thin Around a cigarette, and the bright ember Would pulse with all the life there was within.

The Price of Liberty

Some wars have long been considered honorable. "The Heroes of the Revolution," between 1850 and 1890, by Frederick Girsch. Library of Congress. (Public Domain)

In reading “The New Oxford Book of War Poetry,” or for that matter, any similar survey of such verse, we must bear in mind that the modern poets who write of the horrific brutality of war nonetheless recognize that heroism on the battlefield still exists, as it does in our culture at large. Hollywood, for example, still makes films of men who went above and beyond the call of duty in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. With Memorial Day, we still honor those who died in the service of their country, and we remember all who served on Veterans Day.

Yet harsh reality prevents poets, and the rest of us, from looking at war as being somehow glorious. No longer do they sing in their verses—as did the bards like Homer or the anonymous composers of the legends of Beowulf or Roland—of the nobility to be found in battle.

As Churchill wrote in the article mentioned above:

“The wars of the future will be even less romantic and picturesque. They will apparently be the wars not of armies but of whole populations. Men, women and children, old and feeble, soldiers and civilians, sick and wounded all will be exposed, so we are told, to aerial bombardment, that is to say, to mass destruction by lethal vapour.”

Many of our modern wars have fulfilled that prophecy, and these and other deadly, impersonal weapons have stripped war of any pretensions to the glory it might once have claimed.

And yet, we began with Santayana’s “Tipperary,” and it behooves us to end with his final thoughts in that essay. While lamenting the terrible costs of military conflict—“Homer, who was a poet of war, did not disguise its horrors nor its havoc”—Santayana also recognizes this:

“If you think happiness worth enjoying, think it worth defending. Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die, which is man’s charter of nobility; life would not be worth having without the freedom of soul. ...”

Until things change, the price of that freedom is sometimes the blood and sacrifice of war. And therein lies whatever glory remains.

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