Pliny's Natural History. yellow) of the horse chestnut tree.
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EPITAP H O N A N ARM Y O F MERCENARIE S / 195 3 Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries1 These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead. 5 Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood, and earth's foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay. 1922
1. To honor the heroism of the professional sol-point of that battle, October 31, 1917. See Hugh diers of the British Regular Army in the First Battle MacDiarmid's angry response, 'Another Epitaph ofYpres (1914), Housman published this poem in on an Army of Mercenaries' (p. 2468). The Times on the third anniversary of the turning
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Voices from World War I
The original spark that set off what proved to be the bloodiest and most widespread war that had yet been fought was the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in the Balkan state of Serbia on June 28, 1914. Austria, supported by Germany, used the murder as a reason for declaring war on Serbia, which in turn was supported by its fellow-Slav country Russia. Because Russia was bound by a treaty obligation to both France and Britain, Bussia and France were soon at war with Germany and Austria. The most effective way for Germany to attack France was to go through Belgium, though all the powers had guaranteed Belgian neutrality. The attack on Belgium impelled Britain to declare war on Germany on August 4, but rival imperialisms, an international armaments race, France's desire to regain Alsace-Lorraine, which it had lost to Germany in 1870, and German and Austrian ambitions in the Balkans were some of the many other factors that brought about the four-year struggle, a struggle that shook the world. Turkey sided with Germany and Austria in October 1914, and Bulgaria allied itself with them the following year. Britain and France were joined by Japan late in August 1914, by Italy (although Italy had in 1882 joined the 'Triple Alliance' with Germany and Austria directed against France and Russia) in May 1915, and by the United States in April 1917.
Before the collapse of Germany followed by the armistice of November 11, 1918, some 8,700,000 lives had been lost (including 780,000 British?virtually a whole generation of young men) and the prolonged horrors of trench warfare had seared themselves into the minds of the survivors. For three years the battle line, 'the Western Front,' was stabilized between northwest France and Switzerland, with both sides dug in and making repeated, costly, and generally useless attempts to advance. The German use of poison gas at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, the massive German attack at Verdun in 1916, and the British introduction of tanks on the Somme in the same year failed to produce the breakthrough each side desired. Desolate, war-scarred landscapes with blasted trees and mud everywhere, trenches half-filled with water and infested with rats, miles of protective barbed wire requiring individual 'volunteers' to crawl through machine-gun fire and cut it so an advance could begin, long- continued massive bombardments by heavy artillery, and a sense of stalemate that suggested to the soldiers involved that this living hell could go on forever?all this was long kept from the knowledge of the civilians at home, who continued to use the old patriotic slogans and write in old-fashioned romantic terms about glorious cavalry charges and the noble pursuit of heroic ideals. But those poets who were involved on the front, however romantically they may have felt about the cause when they first joined up, soon realized the full horror of war, and this realization affected both their imaginations and their poetic techniques. They had to find a way of expressing the terrible truths they had experienced, and even when they did not express them directly, the underlying knowledge affected the way they wrote.
The poetry that was in vogue when war broke out, and that some poets continued to write for some years afterward, was named 'Georgian' in honor of King George V, who had succeeded Edward VII in 1910. The term was first used of poets when Edward Marsh brought out in 1912 the first of a series of five anthologies called Georgian Poetry. The work therein represented an attempt to wall in the garden of English poetry against the disruptive forces of modern civilization. Cultured meditations of the English countryside ('I love the mossy quietness / That grows upon the great stone flags') alternated with self-conscious exercises in the exotic ('When I was
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BROOKE: THE SOLDIER / 1955
but thirteen or so / I went into a golden land, / Chimporazo, Cotopaxi / Took me by the hand'). Sometimes the magical note was authentic, as in many of Walter de la Mare's poems, and sometimes the meditative strain was original and impressive, as in Edward Thomas's poetry. But as World War I went on, with more and more poets killed and the survivors increasingly disillusioned, the whole world on which the Georgian imagination rested came to appear unreal. A patriotic poem such as Rupert Brooke's 'The Soldier' became a ridiculous anachronism in the face of the realities of trench warfare, and the even more blatantly patriotic note sounded by other Georgian poems (as in John Freeman's 'Happy Is England Now,' which claimed that 'there's not a nobleness of heart, hand, brain / But shines the purer; happiest is England now / In those that fight') seemed obscene. The savage ironies of Siegfried Sassoon's war poems and the combination of pity and irony in Wilfred Owen's work portrayed a world undreamed of in the golden years from 1910 to 1914.
World War I left throughout Europe a sense that the bases of civilization had been destroyed, that all traditional values had been wiped out. We see this sense reflected in the years immediately after the war in different ways in, for example, T. S. Eliot's Waste Land and Aldous Huxley's early fiction. But the poets who wrote during the war most directly reflected the impact of the war experience.
For more documents, images, and contexts related to this subject, see 'Representing the Great War' at Norton Literature Online.
RUPERT BROOKE 1887-1915
Rupert Brooke was educated at Rugby School and at King's College, Cambridge. When World War I began he was commissioned as an officer into the Royal Naval Division and took part in its brief and abortive expedition to Antwerp. On leave in December 1914 he wrote the 'war sonnets' that were to make him famous; five months later he died of dysentery and blood poisoning on a troopship destined for Gallipoli.
Brooke was the most popular of the Georgians, pastoral poets who infused nature with nationalist feeling. His early death symbolized the death of a whole generation of patriotic Englishmen. Shortly before then the dean of St. Paul's read 'The Soldier' in a sermon from the Cathedral pulpit, and in a 1915 valediction in the London Times, Winston Churchill sounded a note that swelled over the following months and years: 'Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was 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.' Brooke's 1914 and Other Poems was published in June 1915, and during the next decade this and his Collected Poems sold three hundred thousand copies.
The Soldier
