Literature that promotes war

First World War poetry that condemns the waste and brutality of war is amongst the most powerful, passionate and heartfelt poetry ever written. Modern readers of Owen or Sassoon, Rosenberg, Graves or Blunden would be forgiven for thinking that the relationship between poetry and war is one way: poetry dissects and condemns war. Yet not all poetry is the same. Over the centuries much has been written that actively promotes war and it is interesting to consider how it has done so. In fact poets have used a wide range of techniques and approaches and have produced literature that is often as fine and powerful and moving as that which condemns war.

Not always of course. There is a class of propagandist poetry that I find simplistic, crass and distasteful and I do not believe that this is simply because I have been corrupted by too much Wilfrid Owen. This is 'poetry' which plays on base human (male) emotions. It presents war as a glorious exciting game in which the lucky participant can gain prestige and respect and machismo or, if he ducks out, can be forever branded a coward. Jessie Pope actually entitled one such poem Who's For the Game? and referred to war as "The red crashing game of the fight." This sort of appeal to heroism can make reference to the dangers of war on occasion, as in Henry Newbolt's Vitae Lampada (or "Play up, play up, and play the game") in which "The sand of the Desert is sodden red" because it is framed in the heroic fantasy world of boys' imaginations.

However such poetry can be even more explicit about the shame and ignominy that will be visited on anyone who fails to join in. A classic example is Harold Begbie's Fall In which traces this ignominy in imagination through the reader's entire life. In the first verse he asks "But what will you lack when your mate goes by/With a girl who cuts you dead?" then in the second (of the reader's future children) "But where will you look when they give you the glance/That tells you they know you funked." Finally the reader is asked to imagine an old age when his neighbours are talking about their part in the War and he asks "Will you slink away, as if from a blow/Your old head shamed and bent?"

There is another sort of literature that is less explicit about either the violence of war or the consequences of not participating in it. This is the approach that couches the whole enterprise in a sort of warm glow of nobility and patriotism and glory. A classic example is Rupert Brooke's the Soldier but it is interesting that Owen's 1914, written of course before he went to war, is not that different. It frames the conflict as being on a cosmic scale and having a divine purpose, since "the grain of human Autumn rots" and there is a "need/Of sowings for a new Spring, and blood for seed." It is fascinating to consider whether Brooke's attitudes would have changed as radically as Owen's had he survived to reach Galipoli.

Perhaps two of the most famous passages that promote war are from Shakespeare's Henry V, though it must of course be remembered that this is a character speaking not Shakespeare himself. The "Once more unto the breach" speech emphasises the glorious action and the "This day is called the feast of Crispian" focuses more on the glory that will come afterwards, but what is interesting is the emphasis both give to war as a means of proving and bettering oneself. Both speeches present an opportunity to the listeners to establish and augment not just their sense of self-worth but their very standing in society through the medium of war. In the first Henry tells his listeners to "Be copy now to men of grosser blood,/And teach them how to war," and in the second he goes further. Referring to the soldiers as his "band of brothers" he says
"For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."
This may sound like mere rabble-rousing today but Henry precedes this call with a list of names, all of whom Shakespeare's audience would know had achived preferment and advantage through their exploits at war.

Of course modern warmongers cannot offer such meteoric social advancement and it is extraordinary to compare Henry's speech, as fictionalised by Shakespeare, with those of that great poet of the second World War, Winston Churchill. In his speeches he is absolutely explicit that "I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears and sweat." What is remarkable on rereading them today is not just their poetry and power but their uncompromising bleakness. He uses much of the same appeal to grand philosphical ideas of nobility as Brooke and the early Owen but puts much more emphasis on the darkness he feels he is combatting, as for instance when he warns that without war "we will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science." His praise of the Battle of Britain pilots has, in its "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few" has some of the same appeal to simple pride as Henry's "He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,/Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named," and he offers the entire population a taste of that heroism in his famous rallying call "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'" What is striking however is how little he sugar-coats the pill. His response to the significant victories of late 1942 was "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

What I want to bring out from the Churchill speeches however is the extent to which he understood and learned from the poetry of the First World War. He clearly saw how poetry and great literature had been appropriated by the anti-War lobby and he could no longer rely on either the jingoistic simplifications of Begbie or Pope or the bland philosophising of Brooke. So he used his formidable poetic talents not to disguise the reality of war nor to trivialise it but to bring it alive in his readers' imaginations. This was a risky strategy in retrospect: how many prime ministers today would be prepared to state so starkly how little hope he offered and what bleak and terrifying futures he foresaw? Yet it worked. Read for instance the following rallying call to the British people at a time in 1940 when the prospects for victory looked very slim:
"And now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant's might and enmity can do. Bearing ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we are ready to defend our native land against the invasion by which it is threatened. We are fighting by ourselves alone; but we are not fighting for ourselves alone. Here in this strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization; here, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen-we await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock or-what is perhaps a harder test-a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy-we shall ask for none."
The essence of his message is both slim and bleak. He is offering little hope to the British people and giving them no real idea of what the future may hold. All that he can give them is poetry, so that is what they get.

As an avowed pacifist, and one who is appalled for instance by what Allied bombers did to Dresden under Churchill's orders, I find it difficult to decide what I feel about Churchill's wartime speeches. That they were great literature is beyond doubt and they are a world away from the pro-War literature of the First World War. It is also possible that without them Britain would have collapsed and Hitler triumphed. Yet they are without doubt pieces of literature that promote War. So how can I with equanimity recognise their power?

Religion in WW1 poetry

The horrors of World War One were inflicted, in the case of England at least, on a society that still clung to the old certainties of Anglican Christianity. Brooke's concept of the "hearts at peace, under an English heaven" (from his poem The Soldier) is one that many would have found comforting and unassailable, at the start of the war at least. This confidence in the sheltering, caring presence of  a fundamentally English (or at least British) God can be seen everywhere, from Harold Begbie's confidence in Fall In that "England's call is God's" to the pervasive popular myth of the Angels of Mons.

In a fairly disastrous engagement with the superior German forces in the early days of the war the British forces were outnumbered and many killed. Yet the major legacy of that battle for many was the belief that angels had appeared in the sky and had protected British troops. this story was no doubt seized on by propagandists to strengthen morale, but it clearly had its foundation in a strong belief that God was on the British side and that God would protect His own.

As the interminable trench battles dragged on however, such comforting myths were largely forgotten, replaced in most soldiers' minds by contrasting myths such as that of the crucified soldier. Never conclusively pinned down this was the belief that German soldiers had captured a Canadian and tortured him by crucifying him on a barn door. Again, it is possible that this story too was amplified- maybe even invented- for propaganda reasons. however the fact of its popularity makes plain that soldiers responded to it. Their Christianity had come to be a symbol not of reassurance and protection but of pain and death.

This connection is movingly brought out in Siegfried Sassoon's poem The Redeemer, in which he encounters Christ, but dressed as an English soldier who "faced me, reeling in his weariness,/ Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear." Wilfred Owen too saw the parallel between the suffering Christ and the soldiers in the trenches. In a letter to his mother, written when he was in England training new recruits to be shipped over to the Front he wrote "For 14 hours yesterday, I was at work-teaching Christ to lift his cross by the numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands mute before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.”

Wilfred Owen had been set on preparing for the priesthood before his life was overturned by his time in France and it is fascinating to see how he struggled to reconcile his faith with the horrors he witnessed. In one of his angriest poems, The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, he recounts the story of Abraham and Isaac, a central myth in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths. With few changes from the text of the Authorised version of the Bible he retells the story, but placing it in  the setting of the war in France. So in the poem "Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,/And builded parapets and trenches there." Yet the twist he imparts at the end is the truly shocking thing. The original is a symbol not just of Abraham's faith but of God's mercy, for God offers Abraham a ram to sacrifice in the place of his son Isaac. Not so in Owen's poem. The story is the same until the last two lines:
"Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
 A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,   
And half the seed of Europe, one by one."

However to me it is not Owen's anger in this poem that is most shocking, but the completeness of his loss of faith in the aptly named Futility. Here Owen takes a simple story of finding a soldier who had died in the night and makes of it a poem that encapsulates the bleakness of a man whose faith has died. Seeing the man lying dead in the mud Owen thinks of how God created man- breathing life into the clay with which he had formed Adam. Even now he cannot bring himself to make his rejection of God complete and he refers to the "kind old sun" instead, but to me the final lines in the poem are unequivocal. As a committed Christian a core tenet would have been that God created man out of the clay, that God breathed life into the world. The half-rhyme of "tall", "toil" and "at all" with its uneasy incompleteness seems to strengthen the desperate hopelessness as he writes
"Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?"

Serendipity in imagery- or how symbols can acquire new resonances

As I have argued in a a previous post the human brain seems particularly inclined to think in terms of imagery- to recognise the grounds of comparison in terms of connotations and allusions between an idea, concept, feeling or thing and the image, or 'vehicle', with which it is presented. Symbols are the purest expression of this tendency, where artists create a vehicle that is rich in connotations and invite the reader to think about grounds of connection with some feeling or some object or person in the real world. Of course over time the field of connotations on which an individual reader calls can change substantially, meaning that symbols can acquire resonances that were unforseen by their orginal creator.

Blake's the Sick Rose is a well known example of such symbolism, and no doubt readers over the years have felt in it uncanny resonances with particular relationships or emotions they have experienced. What Blake would have been unlikely to be able to foresee was how apposite some readers felt it to be as a symbol for AIDs.  Tennyson's the Eagle can be read as a simple descriptive poem or as a symbol of autocratic, despotic power. Again it is unlikely that the poet could have foreseen the grounds of connection with Adolf Hitler, sitting alone in his Adlerhorst, plotting to unleash the thunderbolts of his Blitzkrieg on a war-torn Europe.

In both of these poems the new grounds that modern readers see, though unsuspected at the time by the poets, chime well with the presumed original intentions of the authors. What fascinates me is where symbols an author creates take on entirely new resonances that their creators would find surprising, even perverse. If a reader sees in a symbol uncanny resonances with concepts or situations that are divorced entirely from their original context, is there any problem with them doing so? I will present two examples and let you judge.

George Orwell's Animal Farm is an acute and moving satire on the way the idealism of the Russian Revolution descended into the brutal repression of Stalinism. A turning point in the plot is when the windmill that the animals have created with enormous, backbreaking effort has been destroyed in a storm. In the story this is clearly a symbol for the failed industrial policies of the Soviet Five Year Plans, and Napoleon's identification of Snowball as the culprit a reference to Stalin's scapegoating of Trotsky and others.

However for me in autumn 2001 this symbol acquired terrible new resonance. On the 11th September a great tower in the real world came crashing down. As in the novel "a cry of despair broke from every animal's throat. A terrible sight had met their eyes. The windmill was in ruins." What was particularly chilling was the way that almost immediately afterwards the actions of George Bush and the neocons, ably assisted by Tony Blair, so exactly paralleled Napoleon's actions in the novel:
"Napoleon paced to and fro in silence, occasionally snuffing at the ground. His tail had grown rigid and twitched sharply from side to side, a sign in him of intense mental activity. Suddenly he halted as though his mind were made up.
'Comrades,' he said quietly, 'do you know who is responsible for this? Do you know the enemy who has come in the night and overthrown our windmill? SNOWBALL!' he suddenly roared in a voice of thunder. 'Snowball has done this thing! In sheer malignity, thinking to set back our plans and avenge himself for his ignominious expulsion, this traitor has crept here under cover of night and destroyed our work of nearly a year. Comrades, here and now I pronounce the death sentence upon Snowball. 'Animal Hero, Second Class,' and half a bushel of apples to any animal who brings him to justice. A full bushel to anyone who captures him alive!'"
Substitute Saddam Hussein for Snowball and there you have it.

The second example is perhaps even further from the author's intention but I find it fascinating. Dickens' Great Expectations is a perennial favourite, recently reimagined as a BBC drama. This adaptation had some excellent features, though it misrepresented the original in some aspects. A key point in the televised version is that Pip might have brought Magwitch the file because he was frightened, but the bringing of the pie was an act of pure goodness that Magwitch never forgot and chose later to reward. Pleasing as this notion might be it is not there in the text. Pip brings the pie because Magwitch tells him "'You get me a file.' He tilted me again. 'And you get me wittles.' He tilted me again. 'You bring 'em both to me.' He tilted me again. 'Or I'll have your heart and liver out.'"

It is in the character of Magwitch and his treatment by Pip that on my last reading of the novel I began to see a symbol that surprised me with its serendipitous relevance. In the original Magwitch is clearly symbolic of the brutalising effects of Victorian England's penal system and Pip's contempt and disgust for him symbolic of the way polite society sought to sweep any awareness of that world under the carpet. Yet I began to see their relationship as a fascinating symbol of the relationship between the rich West and the colonies of the Third World.

Before you immediately stop reading, just think about this summary of the plot, considering Pip as symbolic of the rich West (us) and Magwitch of the Third World:
Pip (the rich West) comes across Magwitch (the Third World) in a dark and baffling whirlwind of fear and excitement. He provides Magwitch with some leftover food and a file (beads, charity and weapons). Later, in the company of men with guns, he comes across Magwitch in a deadly struggle with another convict (another Third World country). The men make no attempt to understand the nature or causes of the struggle but intervene with force to bring about a sort of peace.
Over the years, Pip benefits massively from wealth that originates from Magwitch (the exploited peoples of the Third World). He fails to recognise the origins of his new-found prosperity but sees it as no more than his due, because of his connection to Miss Havisham (the raddled remnants of a grand aristocratic past). In due course, Magwitch, who has "lived rough that you should live smooth; I worked hard that you should be above work." decides he wants to visit Pip (the rich West) to whose benefit he has been breaking his back for years. Here the mood changes and Pip responds with alarm and disgust to the appearance of his benefactor. Pip finds himself "shrinking from him with the strongest repugnance" and experiences "a half-formed terror that it might not be safe to be shut up there with him in the dead of the wild solitary night" (the fear and prejudice directed towards the ex-colonial immigrants by people in the West).
There is great pressure to have Magwitch (the immigrants from the old colonies) removed from polite society. There is then a final scene in which the inexplicable conflict between Magwitch and Compeyson flares up again, in a murky, muddy landscape where nothing can be clearly seen (take your pick- the Iran-Iraq war, the Middle East conflicts, any one of a number of brutal sub-Saharan wars).
To make matters worse, a vast amount of money simply disappears into the dark waters of the Thames (the banking crisis).

This reinterpretation of the text is not intended to be taken entirely seriously. If it was I would be far more guilty than any BBC screenplay writer of distorting the original. However it does demonstrate for me the strange protean power of symbols in literature- that we can see in a text connections and symbolic resonances with events, feelings and situations that the author would never have imagined.