But chiefly I thought of the very strange look on all faces in that camp; an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England, though wars should be in England; nor can it be seen in any battle. But only in Etaples.3
It was not despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit's. It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them.
Preface1
This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War.2 The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may
be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.
(If I thought the letter of this book would last, I might have used proper names; but if the spirit of it survives?survives Prussia3?my ambition and those names will have achieved fresher fields than Flanders.4 . . . )
1918 1920
2. This incident prompted Owen's poem 'The Sentry.' 3. Until 1914, a fishing port of 5,800 inhabitants, Etaples and its surrounding hills housed 100,000 soldiers on their way to and from the front in 1917. 1. In May 1918 Wilfred Owen was posted in Ripon, North Yorkshire, England, and was preparing a book of his war poems. Around this time he drafted this unfinished preface, which was published posthumously, along with most of his poems, in Poems (1920), edited by his friend the poet Siegfried Sassoon. The text is reprinted from The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1985), ed. Jon Stall- worthy.
2. Cf. Jude 1.25: 'To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever.' 3. Dominant region of the German Empire until the end of World War I. 4. In western Belgium, site of the front line. The Canadian poet John McCrae (1872-1918) memorialized one devastating 1915 battle in his famous poem 'In Flanders Fields.'
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1981
MAY WEDDERBURN CANNAN 1893-1973
Born and educated in Oxford, May Wedderburn Cannan was the daughter of the secretary to the delegates (or chief executive) of the Oxford University Press. At eighteen, she joined the Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment, and when England entered the war three years later, she was active in the Red Cross mobilization, setting up a hospital in a local school. During the early part of the war, she worked at Oxford University Press, continued her volunteer nursing, and spent a month as a volunteer worker in a soldiers' canteen in Rouen, France. In 1918 she joined the War Office in Paris to work in intelligence. Her fiance, Bevil Quiller-Couch, survived the devastating Battle of the Somme and the remainder of the war, only to die of pneumonia several months after the armistice. Canaan later worked at King's College, London, and at the Athenaeum Club as assistant librarian. She wrote three books of poems? In War Time (1917), The Splendid Days (1919), and The House of Hope (1923)? and a novel, The Lonely Generation (1934). Her unfinished autobiography, Grey Ghosts and Voices, was published posthumously in 1976.
'Bouen,' with its echoes of G. K. Chesterton's incantatory 'Tarantella' (beginning 'Do you remember an Inn, / Miranda?'), voices emotions closer to those of Bupert Brooke's 'The Soldier' than to any given expression by the other soldier poets in this section. In 1917, however, Cannan and Brooke spoke for what was then the majority. As she wrote in her autobiography: 'Siegfried Sassoon wrote to the Press from France saying that the war was now a war of conquest and without justification, and declared himself to be a conscientious objector. .. . A saying went round, 'Went to the war with Bupert Brooke and came home with Siegfried Sassoon.' ' Her own poems pose an alternative to protest and despair: 'I had much admired some of Sassoon's verse but I was not coming home with him. Someone must go on writing for those who were still convinced of the right of the cause for which they had taken up arms.'
Rouen
26 April-25 May 1915
Early morning over Rouen, hopeful, high, courageous morning, And the laughter of adventure and the steepness of the stair, And the dawn across the river, and the wind across the bridges, And the empty littered station and the tired people there.
5 Can you recall those mornings and the hurry of awakening, And the long-forgotten wonder if we should miss the way, And the unfamiliar faces, and the coming of provisions, And the freshness and the glory of the labour of the day?
Hot noontide over Rouen, and the sun upon the city,
10 Sun and dust unceasing, and the glare of cloudless skies, And the voices of the Indians and the endless stream of soldiers, And the clicking of the tatties,' and the buzzing of the flies.
Can you recall those noontides and the reek of steam and coffee, Heavy-laden noontides with the evening's peace to win,
I. Screens or mats hung in a doorway and kept wet to cool and freshen the air.
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1982 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1
And the little piles of Woodbines,2 and the sticky soda bottles, And the crushes3 in the 'Parlour,' and the letters coming in?
Quiet night-time over Rouen, and the station full of soldiers, All the youth and pride of England from the ends of all the earth; And the rifles piled together, and the creaking of the sword-belts, And the faces bent above them, and the gay, heart-breaking mirth.
Can I forget the passage from the cool white-bedded Aid Post Past the long sun-blistered coaches of the
