Earlier poets recognised the violence of war but saw it as an honourable struggle: death was a worthy sacrifice. Shakespeare says:
“Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more/Or close up the wall with our English dead”, showing that there was a purpose even in death.
"The Charge of the Light Brigade" recalls a disastrous historical military engagement that took place during the Crimean War. Under the command of Lord Raglan, British forces entered the war in September 1854 to prevent the Russians from obtaining control of the important sea routes through the Dardanelles. From the beginning, the war was plagued by a series of misunderstandings and tactical errors. (“Someone has blundered”) One of which serves as the subject of this poem: on October 25, 1854, as the Russians were seizing guns from British soldiers, Lord Raglan sent desperate orders to his Light Cavalry Brigade to fend off the Russians. Finally, one of his orders was acted upon, and the brigade began charging, but in the wrong direction, “Into the valley of Death/Rode the six hundred”! Over 650 men rushed forward, and well over 100 died within the next few minutes. However, under this blanket of fatal failings Tennyson doesn’t fail in his attempt to portray the “Honour of the charge they made”. Despite their obvious doubt: “Their’s not to make reply, / Their’s not to reason why, / Their’s but to do and die” onward rode the ‘noble’ six hundred! Similarly, Henry Newbolt does not dwell on the horrors of warfare. He compares war to a cricket match in a public school: “Play the game”. Likewise Rupert Brooke in “The Soldier” draws inspiration and comfort from God as he describes “an English heaven” with God fighting on their side and a soldier lying dead, but happy to be dead. No one yet understood the reality of war in the trenches. Ironically, at this time neither did Owen, for he saw war in 1914 as fundamentally honourable: “But sweeter still and far more meet/To die in war for brothers”.
With real experience of war, Owen however, soon saw, and described the true horror of war. His descriptions of the front line were unstintingly graphic as he invented a new style of poetry. Owen in his ‘Preface’ says:
“My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”
In his poetry he gives details of life and death in the front line in all its gore and pain There isn’t a better poem of Owen’s than ‘The Sentry’ to illustrate the horrific scenes and suffering of the front line.
“And he gave us hell, for shell on frantic shell…/ Rain guttering down in waterfalls of slime/ Kept slush waist-high that, rising hour by hour,/Choked up the steps too thick with clay to climb”.
These conditions would not have been imaginable only a few years before, but in “The Sentry’ we can see the extent of the horror. A young soldier suffers a tragic fate in horrifying circumstances and in Owen’s presence. Those such as Owen in effect became surrogate fathers to the young men under their command, and the care that Owen shows in this poem typifies those acts of succour that are often lacking in the business of war. At the same time, Owen conscientiously tells the entire truth. "Yet I forget him there." Owen, a changed man in this hell hole, is hardened and knows death is his soldier’s only relief: “Half-listening to the sentry’s moans and jumps" as he goes about his other duties. The last line: "I see your lights! – But ours had long gone out" makes a terrifying conclusion, not only underlining the personal tragedy of the battle hardened Owen, but on a wider front reminding us of the famous words of Sir Edward Grey at the outbreak of war:
“The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime”.
Ironically, “Dulce et Decorum Est”, meaning it is sweet and honourable to die for your country, describes the recurring nightmare of war. The intention was not so much to induce pity as to shock civilians at home who believed war was noble and glorious. The soldiers are not glorified, they are: “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks/ Knock-Kneed, coughing like hags”. Owen attacks those people at home who uphold the war’s continuance, unaware of its realities. If only they might experience Owen’s own "smothering dreams" which replicate in small measure the victim’s sufferings. Those sufferings Owen goes on to describe in sickening detail. This can apply, perhaps, to one person in particular, the ‘my friend’ identified as Jessie Pope, whose patriotic poems epitomised the glorification of war that Owen so despised. Imagine, he says, the urgency, the panic that causes a dying man to be ‘flung’ into a wagon, the ‘writhing’, the ‘jolts’. Hell seems close at hand with the curious simile "like a devil’s sick of sin". If possible, worse still, death seems inevitable from the moment of the ‘Send Off’: “Shall they return to beatings of great bells/In wild train-loads? /A few, a few, too few for drums and yells”. Parallels with the novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” can be drawn as Paul never thinks he will actually return home and go back to a ‘normal’ life. Now even religion is powerless to help: “for love of God seems dying”; this horror has made Owen, once a clergyman, doubt the presence of a loving God; where now is Rupert Brooke’s ‘English heaven’?
In both poems Owen shows us men under unendurable stress. Like the men in “Anthem for the Doomed Youth” who "die as cattle", these are "herded from the blast". A whine is one of the least manly of sounds but the sentry, all shreds of dignity lost, whines, "O, sir, - my eyes,- ". He sobs, needs, child-like, to be helped. These so called noble knights of the past, are now soldiers reduced to the claws of hell, and placed in a situation where death is the only relief.
Owen’s poetic style, too, is very different form the elegant, gentle verse of the Georgians before him. The use of words like ‘bled’ and ‘spewed’ and images such as ‘blood/come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs’ revolutionised poetry. In poems again like ‘The Sentry’, the sounds of war are captured terrifyingly through a number of poetic devices; notably alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia. One of his techniques is assonance where the words are echoing the sound of what he is describing. A succession of identical vowel sounds (u): "buffeting", "snuffing", "thud", "flump", "thumping", "pummelled", "crumps" which suggest hard-hitting assault and battery and ruthless punishment. We also find "mud", "ruck" are repeated, and the heavy, ugly words match the situation and add to the atmosphere. Ambience is heightened by examples onomatopoeia. The guttural alliteration of, "Kept slush waist high", “Choked up the steps too thick” and the “whizz-bangs” that "found our door at last" both add a layer of malevolence to the enemy action. How powerfully Owen conveys the conditions they live and die under. "Waterfalls of slime" is almost ironic, for our notion of a waterfall is surely of a pure, clear cascade. We see "the steps too thick with clay to climb" and that awful olfactory image, "What murk of air remained stank old, and sour."
Owen throws the reader directly into the front line of the battle, but even more horrifying are his descriptions of those who survive. Death is a blessing when one looks at the alternatives described in the poems ‘Mental Cases and ‘Disabled’. ‘Mental Cases’ describes the “Multitudinous murders they once witnessed” and their terrible effects. Almost like Macbeth everywhere they look they are reminded of blood: “Back into their brains, because of their sense/Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black; /Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh”. Owen describes exactly what he sees, hears and more disturbingly he feels. “- Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous, /Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.” He insinuates that they might as well be dead; the corpses smile with the thought that they are dead and have escaped from this hell on earth. ‘Disabled’ starts with an injured soldier “sat in a wheeled chair”; he has lost his independence he is dependent on others for survival. Now because of the war “he will never feel again how slim/ Girls’ waists are, or how warm their subtle hands”. In addition he describes the changed perspective; how he had “liked a blood-smear down his leg, /After the matches carried shoulder-high”. However, others’ perspectives of him have changed dramatically: “There was an artist silly for his face”, but now ‘disabled’ “Only a solemn man who brought him fruits/Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul”. Even those not obviously injured have to live with the guilt of survival. Evidence of guilt is a clear motif throughout many of Owen’s war poems. At the end of ‘The Send- Off’ Owen asks “shall they return to beatings of great bells in wild train-loads? /A few, a few, too few for drums and yells”. In ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est” he says: “in all my dreams before my helps sight he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning”. ‘The Sentry’ admits that: “Eyeballs, huge bulged like squids’, /Watch my dreams still; but I forgot him there”.
Owen recognised that war was no longer glorious or honourable for the common soldiers- the times of knights on steeds and valiant hand to hand combat against natives is covered by the dust of time. Machine guns, bombs, tanks and suffocating gasses was the type of modern warfare. He experienced it first hand and saw war was merely destructive. “Shall life renew these bodies” he asks in ‘The End’, and the only answer he can find is that “It is death”. “Futility” asks why the Earth was created if we are only going to destroy it: “-O what made fatuous sunbeams toil / To break earth’s sleep at all?” In essence, from his experience Owen now knows that there is no purpose in fighting such a terrible war. And now it is the duty of the poets to tell the truth about war:
“All poets can do today is warn. That is why the true poets must be truthful”