ENGL1013

World War I (WWI or The Great War)

 WWI or The Great War
• 1914-1918
• Allies: Britain and her empire, France, Russia,
Australia, NZ, Italy, America, Japan, China
• Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary,
Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria
• 8 million dead
 Initial ideas about war
• Patriotism
• Glory
• Heroism
• Adventure
• Violence
 Romanticised notions
Pre-WWI conventions used in poetic language
about war

• Horse • Steed
• Enemy • The foe
• To attack • To assail
• Sleep • Slumber
• To die • To perish
• Dead bodies • Ashes/Dust
• Sky • Heavens
 Rupert Brooke
• 3 August 1887 – 23 April
1915

• Idealistic and romantic

war poems

• Very handsome young

man
Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
 Grim realities of war…
• Though propaganda and other narratives
continue the idea of war as noble, even like a
sporting game of football…

• Grim realities undercut the romantic notions

of valour, heroism, adventure…
Trenches
• From horses to miles and miles of trenches
• ‘Going over’
• Life in the trenches:
– Boredom, anxiously waiting for action
– Cross-section of society
– Vermin eg. rats, lice
– Mud and more mud!
– Walls of earth and the open sky above // almost like
being in a grave
War of attrition:
• Win a bit of new ground; lose the ground taken (at
the cost of many lives)
• Little progress over 4 years
• Stalemate

• Captain G. B. Pollard in a letter, October 1914:

‘It’s absolutely certainly a war of ‘attrition,’ as
someone said here the other day, and we have got to
stick it longer than the other side and go on producing
men, money, and material until they cry quits, and
that’s all about it, as far as I can see.” (quoted in Paul
Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 9)
Slaughter
• Industrialised war:
– powerful artillery; airplanes; chemical gas warfare
– massive scale of death and destruction
– dominance of the machine; the powerless soldier
– Bodies ripped apart
• Landscape:
– desolate, like the moon, barren of life
– No man’s land
• Meaninglessness
– barely any ground gained for the numbers of lives lost
 Edmund Blunden (in Fussell, 13)

‘By the end of the day both sides had seen, in a

sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men,
the answer to the question. No road. No
thoroughfare. Neither race had won, nor could
they win, the War. The War had won, and would
go on winning.’
 Writers and the war
• What did feel like to be a combatant in this war?

• What kinds of feelings would you want to

express?

• How do you write about such a horrible and

unprecedented situation?
‘The literary records of the Great War can be
seen as a series of attempts to evolve a
response that would have some degree of
adequacy to the unparalleled situation in
which the writers were involved .’

Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight, 41

 A literary response
• The use of Christian myth and romance eg. John
Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
• An army of readers  A wealth of literary allusions
– Easy to get books from home and what better to do than
read when in the trenches
– Indescribable, and yet using a familiar literary tradition to
talk about the war

• The ironic mode

 Allusion

• A reference, usually indirect, to a literary text

or event

• Reader has to work out the allusion

 Irony
• Meaning one thing when actually saying
something divergent in meaning
• Sarcasm as a cousin of irony; usually more
heavy-handed and obvious
• Irony: when you expect or say one thing and
are undercut by a very different result
 Wilfred Owen

• Celebrated WWI poet

who died in the last
year of the war
 ‘Dulce et Decorum est’
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
through sludge,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
behind.
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!---An ecstasy of fumbling,
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,---
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green
Pro patria mori.
light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
‘Dulce et Decorum est’
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!---An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
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.

Note:
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: It is sweet and right to die for
your country (from Horace)
Aftermath
 Male Hysteria
• Hysteria is usually associated with women,
but men suffered from this too
• Doctors usually advised male hysterics to
have an outdoor holiday
• During and after WWI: a spike in cases of male
hysteria – ‘shell shock’
 Hysteria - recap

• Mental or emotional trauma  Memory

repressed  trauma expressed as bodily
symptom eg. Paralysis, shaking, mutism
 Shell shock

• Experience of death and mutilation during the

war

• Repressing fears and emotions during the war

• Expression of these repressed emotions in

bodily symptoms
Following Breuer and Freud, [William] Brown argued that the
characteristic signs of "shell-shock"-stupor, confusion, mutism, loss of
sight or hearing, spasmodic convulsions or trembling of the limbs,
anesthesia, exhaustion, sleeplessness, depression, and terrifying,
repetitive nightmares, all symptoms hitherto associated chiefly
(although not exclusively) with female hysteria-were bodily expressions
of obstructed or "repressed" emotions. Brown reasoned that when a
soldier was confronted with the need to maintain self-control and army
discipline in front-line conditions of unremitting physical and
psychological stress, he was likely to respond to any significant trauma
by breaking down. Unable to discharge his powerful emotions directly,
through action or speech, he unconsciously "materialized" them by
converting them into physical or bodily symptoms. Most striking of all,
the patient would not remember anything about the horrifying events
that lay at the origin of his pitiable state. Dissociation, or amnesia, was
therefore the hallmark of the war neuroses.

Ruth Leys, ‘Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory’
Ivor Gurney
• Musician and poet
• Survived the war, despite being
gassed
• History of mental and emotional
instability, which continued after
the war
• Diagnosed as suffering from shell
shock
• Last 15 years of his life lived in
mental institutions
To His Love

He’s gone, and all our plans Are

useless indeed. We’ll walk no
more on Cotswolds Where the
sheep feed Quietly and take no
heed.
His body that was so quick Is
not as you Knew it, on Severn
River Under the blue Driving
our small boat through.
You would not know him now…
But still he died
Nobly, so cover him over
With violets of pride
Purple from Severn side.
Cover him, cover him soon!
And with thick-set
Masses of memoried flowers -
Hide that red wet
Thing I must somehow forget.
To His Love

He’s gone, and all our plans

Are useless indeed.
We’ll walk no more on Cotswolds
You would not know him now…
Where the sheep feed
But still he died
Quietly and take no heed.
Nobly, so cover him over
With violets of pride
Purple from Severn side.
His body that was so quick
Is not as you
Knew it, on Severn River
Cover him, cover him soon!
Under the blue
And with thick-set
Driving our small boat through.
Masses of memoried flowers -
Hide that red wet
Thing I must somehow forget.
 WWI poetry and modern
literature

• Shocking grimness of subject matter

• The sounds of vernacular language

represented in the poetry

• Bitter cynicism in the tone