The Poetry of Bombs and Trenches and Mustard Gas

Michael Korda’s harrowing account of the lives—and deaths—of those who put the Great War into verse.

Muse of Fire
World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets
by Michael Korda
Liveright, 381 pages, $29.99 (hardcover) $19.99 (paperback)

THE AWFUL DESTRUCTIVENESS of the First World War, which ripped its way through the best of a generation like a flail at harvest time, has long been exhaustively documented and mourned and reviled. But in Muse of Fire, Michael Korda, an intellectually sprightly nonagenarian with a distinguished military background and two dozen books to his credit, has written an insightful study of several of the major English (and one American) war poets whose experience became emblematic of the general course of the war and significantly shaped the public mind, from the innocent irrational enthusiasm of the early going to the disgust and despair as the slaughter proceeded with no good end in sight. No other war, Korda writes, has been so completely subject to official censorship. The authorities saw to it that the newspapers and soldiers’ letters home told as little as possible of the insane bloodletting and the routine excruciation of life in the trenches. As no one else could, soldier poets laid bare the pointless suffering as it occurred. And thus, for a brief time, English poetry became a matter of civic importance, as never before and never since.

Rupert Brooke gets the lion’s share of Korda’s attention. He was the war’s first poet-hero, and indeed was celebrated for his poetry, his intellect, and his golden personal charms—William Butler Yeats called him “the handsomest young man in England,” to widespread agreement—well before the war started. His most famous peacetime lyric was “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester,” which enumerates the simple glories of everyday English coziness, and rises to the famous ending, “. . .oh, yet / Stands the Church clock at ten to three? / And is there honey still for tea?” He lived in the bucolic refuge Grantchester for a time while a student at Cambridge, where he belonged to the most exclusive cohort of the intellectual elite, the Apostles, and became a passionate advocate of Fabianism—George Bernard Shaw’s prescription for socialism without tears. While punting on the Cam, Henry James advised the student prince not to be afraid to be happy, and Brooke pursued happiness rather after the manner of Peter Pan; he saw J.M. Barrie’s hit play about the eternal boy more times than he could count, and fell in love with a succession of distressingly chaste young women (distressing to him anyway) who knew in their hearts he would never be marriage material. The fleshly yet soulful raptures he had long sought were finally found in the embraces of a Tahitian beauty he called Tuatamata during a Gauguin-like reconnaissance of the South Pacific. He didn’t take her home to meet his mother.

The thought of death did not trouble him nearly as much as the prospect of “the long littleness of life,” in the words of his friend the poet Frances Cornford, who wrote Brooke’s eulogy while he was still very much alive. So when Brooke went to war, as a second lieutenant in the Royal Naval Division, for which Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, personally signed him up, it was with cavalier eagerness for the novel thrill of confronting lethal violence. In a letter to a young woman he was sort of in love with in his feckless way, he stated, evidently without a trace of self-awareness, that during the German bombardment of Antwerp, his one and only taste of action, he proved himself “incredibly brave.”

The five sonnets that compose the sequence 1914 bid a breezy adieu to the too familiar English life that has come to seem no life at all, in which love and honor have no real place. Death merits extravagant esteem, for its unrelenting wartime presence has restored the best of manly feeling to a generation that had been enervated by peace and depleted of nobility. The soldier fearlessly accepts death for his country’s sake, in the most celebrated lines Brooke ever wrote: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.” After the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral read “The Soldier” during a sermon on Easter Sunday in April 1915 and proceeded to extol “the enthusiasm of a pure and elevated patriotism,” the Times published the sermon the next day and made Brooke instantly renowned.

Meanwhile, Brooke, headed for Gallipoli with a mighty amphibious attack force, was prostrated by sunstroke in Egypt and bothered by what looked to be an infected mosquito bite on his upper lip. Presently, on the island of Lemnos, the apparently innocuous bite went rogue, and ten days later Brooke died from septicemia. Quite likely the fatal blood poisoning spared him the trouble of dying in the debacle at Gallipoli, as three of the five young officers who attended his funeral did. Winston Churchill wrote Brooke’s obituary in the Times and lauded him as “all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered.” Korda has no patience with Churchill’s magniloquence here, and laments “the transformation of Rupert Brooke into a recruiting symbol. . . . with the result that not only was he a victim of the war, but so was his poetry: for many years only the war sonnets were remembered, as if the rest did not exist.”

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UNIQUELY AMONG THE WAR POETS, Brooke’s innocence remained intact; it was left to others to know intimately the worst that the mechanized war of attrition could do. The American poet Alan Seeger, who at Harvard had roomed with T.S. Eliot and palled around with John Reed, alone of these more experienced soldiers wrote about the war with the excitement of an innocent, which he no longer was. “‘I have a rendezvous with Death at some disputed barricade,’ ‘they came for honor not for gain,’ ‘that rare privilege of dying well’: Seeger was as romantic about war and as eager for death as Rupert Brooke.” Impervious to the insult to humanity that was life in the trenches, this 1914 volunteer with the French Foreign Legion retained his equanimity and his zest for la Gloire, even as day-to-day “wastage” picked off the unwary and the unlucky, and inglorious battle after battle swept away his comrades and his enemies by the hundreds of thousands at a time. He would last until the “big push” at the Somme in July 1916, when machine gun fire took him down. The mass grave into which his remains were tossed was soon destroyed by German shelling, but his was not to be so ignominious an end. “Everything Seeger yearned for happened after his death,” Korda observes. In 1916 Scribner published his poems to the acclaim denied him while he was alive, posthumous military honors came his way, and in 1925 “an immense heroic bronze statue resembling Seeger was erected on the Place des États-Unis in Paris.” Vive la muerte, as the Nationalists would exclaim while slaughtering Republicans in the Spanish Civil War two decades after the hecatombs of the Great War.

Isaac Rosenberg, painter as well as poet, “slight, short, frail, and timid,” cut an especially unimpressive figure as a soldier, remained a private throughout his service, and expressed his decided lack of interest in patriotism or personal distinction. “Nothing can justify war. I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over,” he wrote to Edward Marsh (who was a friend and mentor to him, Brooke, and many other poets). Rosenberg’s parents were Jewish refugees from pogrom-ridden Russian Lithuania who wound up in London’s dismal East End, his father an itinerant peddler, and young Rosenberg’s straitened life gave him every disadvantage, including artistic brilliance and integrity. He joined the army in late 1915 because he could not earn a living any other way. “It was sheer need. He had run out of options for providing for himself. In the army, he would at least be fed, housed, and paid a shilling a day.” His only recourse was enlistment in a “Bantam battalion,” for which the regulation minimum height of five-foot-three was waived. To Edward Marsh, he bewailed his having fallen “amongst a horrible rabble. . . . Falstaff’s scarecrows were nothing to these. Three out of every 4 have been scavengers, the fourth is ticket-of-leave [on probation].”

No illusion hampered his cold eye. What he called Brooke’s “begloried sonnets” earned his disdain. Korda praises Rosenberg’s imperturbable icy disinterestedness: “He did not lament the cruelty and the suffering—he described it precisely, so the reader could not avoid it.” In his most famous poem, “Break of Day in the Trenches,” that unsparing eye of his traces the movements of “a queer, sardonic rat,” which makes its “cosmopolitan” rounds from English trench to German, filling its belly with the meat of dead men. To Korda, Rosenberg comes closer than any other poet to the living horror of the war. “There is no hint of glory or sacrifice, still less of eagerness to face death. The dead, on both sides, are the victims of random murder on a mass scale, no more heroic than the victims of an accident.” Rosenberg’s fatal accident would come in March 1918, when he was blown to pieces while on night patrol in no man’s land. While he was still alive, a few scattered poems of his appeared in little-read magazines and promptly disappeared; not until 1937 were his poems collected and published. Rosenberg remains the least-known of these war poets, and one is grateful to Korda for his stirring advocacy of this notoriously unlucky man.

But then the young men of privilege quite unlike Rosenberg, Oxbridge types commissioned as officers upon enlistment as a matter of course, were prone to ill luck all their own. The highest English death rate in the war was that of Oxford graduates from 1913 and 1914: More than one in five of them were killed. By 1916, the life expectancy of a new second lieutenant in the field was six weeks. The audacious offensives so popular among the Allied generals had already been proven suicidal early in the war, but the leadership was slow on the uptake. For junior officers, leading their men in predictably futile attacks was part of the job description: “They were still expected to walk cheerfully into massed rifle and machine-gun fire despite artillery barrages and poison gas.” It is not hard to understand, then, that by 1917 young officers such Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, who had demonstrated beyond any doubt their military worthiness in action and had survived dangerous wounds, “were nevertheless determined to show the war for the cruel, shameful, and wasteful descent into hell that they knew it to be.”

Graves was uncommonly proud of the rich tradition of his regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, yet that would not stop him from packing his poems with loathing for the daily monstrosities he and his men had to endure:

To-day I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

Such unabashed grisliness was Graves’s poetic wartime innovation. When Graves met Sassoon in October 1915—in a mess hall he happened upon a book of the “decadent” poet Lionel Johnson’s essays belonging to Sassoon, and hungry for serious conversation he looked him up—Graves was the combat-tested veteran of Loos and an author already collecting his war poems for book publication, while Sassoon was unblooded as soldier and poet. The emphatic gruesomeness and sneering irony of Graves’s poetry took Sassoon aback at first, but in time he too would be writing what Korda calls “angry, sarcastic, defiant” poems such as “Base Details”: “If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath / I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base, / And speed glum heroes up the line to death.”

No hero was more glum than Sassoon—or at any rate made such a spectacle of his glumness. While recuperating in the comfort of an English country house from his encounter with a sniper’s bullet in the spring of 1917, he conceived a formal protest against the course the war had taken; presently he wrote to his commanding officer and declared his Non serviam: “I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.” He added a fillip to the thick skulls of “the majority of those at home,” who lack “sufficient imagination to realise” the soldiers’ agonies. What prevented him from condemning the generals as well as the civilian leadership is unclear, for the brass hats were at least as culpable for the ruin as the frock coats. In any event, the pacifist Bertrand Russell introduced Sassoon to a member of Parliament who read the statement aloud in the House of Commons, meaning it would be published in Hansard and broadcast in newspapers throughout the country; so the aggrieved and determined officer thought he was launched on the inexorable via dolorosa to a well-publicized court martial and imprisonment or a firing squad.

But the army proposed examination by a medical board instead. Apparently bent on martyrdom in preference to being deemed mentally defective, Sassoon had to be talked into appearing before the board by Robert Graves, who was himself convalescing from wounds that had nearly killed him. Graves would be the star witness in the case for Sassoon’s temporary incompetence of mind, breaking down in tears while describing his friend’s heroism under fire and the irrepressible anguish that caused him to go astray. The board ruled the wayward officer a shellshock victim and sent him for treatment at Craiglockhart War Hospital outside Edinburgh, where the objective was to render the patient fit to return to action as quickly as possible. Of the 1,800 officers treated there, some 800 eventually went back to the front.

Sassoon’s act of defiance “had made him far more famous than his poetry could have done,” and indeed turned him into a figure of legend; Churchill himself would later say, dubiously perhaps, that his own intervention had spared Sassoon’s life. Sassoon for his part redoubled his poetic efforts while hospitalized, and there he also met and befriended the fellow patient who would surpass him as the greatest English poet of the war: Wilfred Owen.

When war broke out, Owen, an ambitious son of the lower middle class, was teaching English at a Berlitz school in Bordeaux, and felt no desire to leap into the fray. By the autumn of 1915, however, the school had long been closed, and he signed up for the Artists Rifles, a peculiarly English outfit composed of patriotic painters and poets that trained in Bloomsbury. In June 1916 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment and sent into battle. In one of his first war poems, the memory of a soldier temporarily blinded by a whizbang explosion stays with him in its appalling grotesquerie, although in the press of action Owen had quickly moved on to other business: “Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids / Watch my dreams still; but I forgot him there / In posting next for duty. . . .”

Then in April 1917 a German shell sent Owen himself hurtling through the air. The blast set him down amid the fragments of his friend Second Lieutenant Hubert Gaukroger’s corpse, “horribly disinterred” (in Owen’s phrase) from the shallow grave in which it had been hastily buried. Owen apparently spent several days lying there among his friend’s body parts. “This time the damage to his nerves was impossible for him to control.” The psychic shock wave did not knock him over until his brigade had left the front line; although his superior officer suspected him of shirking, as superior officers were wont to do with shellshock cases, the legitimate injury was obvious to the battalion medical officer, and Owen was posted to Craiglockhart.

That August he happened to be reading Sassoon’s poems with great admiration when he discovered that their cherished author was also a patient at the hospital. Owen’s anxious approach was met with the ceremonious frost of aristo hauteur. But Owen came back for more from his hero, and they grew close over their shared battle trauma and their love for poetry. Sassoon’s critical eye saw flaws in Owen’s work, and emendations he made to “Anthem for Doomed Youth” helped make it the most popular poem Owen wrote, and the most anthologized one the war produced.

Korda contends that “Wilfred’s war poems lack the ferocious anger and sarcasm of Sassoon’s; he was perceptive enough to realize that and wrote of himself, ‘My subject is War and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity.’” Yet Korda’s estimate fails to take account of Owen’s greatest and most terrible poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” although Korda quotes it in full. Here are the last several lines, which present a soldier “guttering, choking, drowning” in a poison gas attack.

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.

This is closely focused rage and sardonic contempt as fierce as Sassoon’s at his most intense.

Both Sassoon and Owen returned to the front. Sassoon was shot in the head, accidentally it appears, by one of his own men; he survived the wound, and would not be sent back into action again. Owen was shot and killed one week before the Armistice.

Sassoon and Owen capture in verse the sheer frightfulness of trench warfare; they are the supreme English war poets of their generation. Yet measure their work beside the poetry of Wilhelm Klemm, a German army physician who treated the wounded and dying. Here is a passage from “Clearing Station”:

The ventriloquist voices of the tetanus cases.
Their frozen, agonized grinning, their wooden grimaces.
The ribbons of spilt blood, on which one loses one’s footing.
The gamut of odors.
The great pitchers full of pus, cotton-wool, blood, amputated limbs,
the dressings full of maggots. The wounds full of bone and straw.
One man raises himself on his stinking bed,
a great, sick, naked bird. Another
weeps like a child: “Comrade, help me!”

The best English war poets remain self-consciously poetic. Klemm tears off a bleeding limb from a ravaged body and presents it for the reader’s perusal. With a clinician’s precision he shows plainly, This is what it was. The rest, however skillfully done, is art.