The hell where youth went

Four million wouldn’t have watched Remembrance Sunday proceedings, the ceremony would not have survived eight decades, had there not always been this remembered reality: the exploding shells and the gas and the smoke and the muck and the angst of the trenches, of watching comrades fall or being blown apart, the Pity of War with which we came to associate all warfare. And yet, so many of us remember WWI mainly because of the millions of icons it produced; symbols which imbibe the reality long gone and hold it for posterity. They are the mileposts of history, the objective correlative of emotions people have felt within ever since. Where does one begin to count them? Harry Patch — the last veteran of the trenches on the western front, the Whitehall Cenotaph, the little red poppies people sported there on Sunday evoking the Flemish battlefields that could grow only poppies after the conflict, the war graves and memorials, the verdant Somme fields, the Last Post at Ypres’s Menin Gate sounding every night at 8pm for 80 years, the Menin Gate that Flemish locals revere dutifully and that Siegfried Sassoon despised, Sassoon’s poetry itself?

The war has educated us through everything it produced, every life and intellect it touched directly or indirectly. But one will be forgiven for favouring its historians and poets. The historians are still ascertaining facts and assessing posterity’s perspective. Did British enthusiasm for the “needless war” peak in 1914, when the Rupert Brookes who saw no first-hand action were dying to die in the corner of some foreign field? Or did it peak later, in 1918, as some revisionists claim? Haven’t British historians been bloody insular and forgotten the French, the Belgians, the Canadians, the Indians, the Germans, et al?

But essential truth comes to us through its poets, most of whom were there, all of them long dead, some of the best of whom died there. Of the millions of icons, surpassing the memorials, surpassing historical and literary classics in prose (say, genuine icons like Robert Graves’s masterpiece, Goodbye to All That, or the hackneyed icons of All Quiet on the Western Front or A Farewell to Arms), surpassing the rituals of remembrance, some of these poems stand the best chance of survival should another global cataclysm engulf us. History, fiction and memoirs came afterwards; all the significant poetry was written during the war. This poetry matters also because never again perhaps will poets be thrown into the middle of battle. If poets ever write about wars again, they will do so vicariously.

What we learnt from the war is what we must remember by remembering the Armistice Day, nothing more than an icon itself: “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori” — the war put to rest for ever the popular belief in the nobility of dying for one’s country, as immortalised and chastised by Wilfred Owen in these lines. But we may also remember that in gaining this wisdom we also lost the notion of sacrifice, the value of youthful idealism per se. Reductively, our moral response to war has followed the evolution of the sentiment of WWI poetry. If we divide that poetry into four phases and choose, once more, an iconic poet for each, we get: idealism (Brooke), anger (Sassoon), compassion (Owen) and transcendence (Isaac Rosenberg). Each phase upheld one essential emotional reality or moral quest. Institutionalised history uses the larger history of the war to give perspective to the millions of personal histories that built up the former, creating a causal chain. But the poetry of WWI teaches us to not repeat that history, to heed Sassoon: “You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye/ Who cheer when soldier lads march by,/ Sneak home and pray you’ll never know/ The hell where youth and laughter go.” And then, whether we go to war or not, to cultivate in us the “cosmopolitan sympathies” of Rosenberg’s droll rat that are always vulnerable to disruption. Signs may be empty in themselves; but to have known and to remember is to derive meaning daily from the icons that hold those millions of signs that we know point to a truth. When living memory dies with the flesh and blood icons of the last veterans, these inanimate — tangible or abstract — icons will be all left us to remind ourselves, least of all: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, sed dulcius pro patria vivere.

sudeep.paul@expressindia.com