“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.”
A Long Look Back
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.
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.”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.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
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.