War Poetry and the Experience of British Soldier Poets

Rupert Brooke's Legacy

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) came from a wealthy family. He studied at King’s college in Cambridge. He joined the army but didn’t manage to get to the front as he died during training in 1915. He gained success during the war as a ‘war poet’ thanks to his war sonnets among which ‘The soldiers’. He became a symbol of the English propaganda to encourage young men to enlist and fight for the country. He was called ‘The romantic hero’ as he had a sentimentalized view of the war.

Wilfred Owen's Tragic Experience

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) came from a working class family. To gain money for his studies he moved to France where he started teaching English. In 1915 he came back and enlisted. A turning point of his life and his career was the Battle of the Somme during which he remained buried for three days with his friends’ corpses. He was diagnosed shell shocked and was sent to a War hospital in Scotland where he met Sigried Sassoon. After the treatment he went back to the front where he died a week before the Armistice (November 11th 1918).

Owen's Poetic Depiction of War

It is based on Owen’s experience of the horrors of the war in the trenches and it is an attempt to communicate the pity of War to future generations. It is the recollection of an old and gloomy memory of the past. The poem describes with the description of a group of soldiers exhausted by the war around them. Suddenly they find themselves under a gas attack. One soldier fails to fit his gas mask in time and is overtaken by the gas. Owen describes the soldier’s agonizing death. There are a lot of alliteration and a lot of distress. There is no rhyme. The Latin phrase ‘Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori’ means that is sweet and fitting to die for the country. Owen criticizes the way society, through propaganda, misled young men into believing that dying in war was a noble act.

The last stanza is a dialogue between the narrator and the reader. Death is like a punishment and there is finally the realization that war is actually an inhuman and not heroic act at all.

In the poem he recreates the miserable conditions and constant stress in which the soldiers lived. He also gives strong visual descriptions of the effects of the poisoned gas and the reality of death, describing the faces of his mates.

Siegfried Sassoon's Disillusionment

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) came from a wealthy family and studied at Clare University in Cambridge but abandoned before the degree. He joined the army but, because of an injury to his arm, he started fighting in 1915, one year later. His courage and abilities earned him the nickname of ‘Mad Jack’. But he gradually became disenchanted with the conflict. He was sent to the Scottish War Hospital for shell shock, where he met Owen. After the treatment he went back to the front and survived. For the rest of his life he was a prolific writer and he wrote many novels, even though the most famous one of his collection remains ‘Memoirs of an Infantry Officer’.

Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

It is a fictionalized version of Sassoon’s autobiography. The narrative picks up in 1916 and moves from the trenches to the army school, to Morlancourt, to a raid and then to Somme. At the beginning of the war most days in the battalion weren’t particularly exciting but actually marked by a sense of boredom and annoyance as they’re stuck in muddy and unpleasant trenches. Days are spent waiting for something to happen and orders are compulsory and contradictory. The battalions risk their lives on missions to capture the trenches and results in needless deaths and injuries. They go on suicidal missions but they just accept it: they’re part of the machine that is war. George is injured when a shrapnel shell passes through his lung. He is sent to home where he is shocked by the ignorance of the general public. He realizes how pointless the action is and how many lies are printed on newspapers. So he arranges to have lunch with the editor of an anti war newspaper as he is determined to speak out against the war, though this could result in his execution. He is not killed and not sentenced for treason but he is sent to Slateford war hospital for shell shock, thanks to his friend David Chromlech, alter ego of Robert Graves.