They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom's cause.
It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse?
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.
Stephen Spender responded with an essay, in which he wrote: 'At the beginning of the last war Rupert Brooke and others were 'trumpets singing to battle.' Wh y did not Bupert Brooke step forward 'young and goldenhaired' this time? No doubt, in part, precisely because one had done so last time. There is another reason: the poetry of the war of democracy versus fascism had already been written by English, French, Spanish, German and Italian emigre poets during the Spanish war.'
With few exceptions the British poets of the 1930s had been born shortly before
the outbreak of World War I, and those who were to be the poets of World War II
were born during that earlier conflict. They grew up not, as Bupert Brooke, in the
sunlit peace of Georgian England but amid wars and rumors of wars. They lived
through the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Introduced to the horrors of
the last war?increased to mythic proportions by their fathers, uncles, and elder
brothers?they were continually reminded of it by a flood of best-selling battle mem
oirs: Edmun d Blunden's Undertones of War (1928), Robert Graves's Goodb)'e to All
That (1929), Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry1 Officer (1930) and Sherston's
Progress (1936), and David Jones's In Parenthesis (1937). By then another myth, that
of the Next War, was taking even more terrifying shape. Western intellectuals' last
hope for the 1930s rested with the ragged troops of the left-wing Spanish Bepublic
in their civil war against the right-wing Spanish Army that had mutinied in 1936
against the country's elected government. Democracy and fascism were at last in the
open, fighting a war that many thought would determine not simply the future of
Spain but the future of Europe. The conscience of the West was aroused as never
since the Greek War of Independence against the Turks in 1821?29, in which Byron
had lost his life. With the final defeat of the Spanish Bepublicans in 1938, the Next
Wa r ceased to be a myth so muc h as an all-but-inescapable certainty. At the start of
W. B. Yeats's poem 'Lapis Lazuli' (1938), 'hysterical women say': everybody knows or else should know That if nothing drastic is done
2451
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2452 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR II
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.
World Wa r I had been fought, for the most part, on the land, and its emblem in popular mythology was the trench. After the indiscriminate killing of civilians in a bombing raid?by German aircraft?on the Spanish town of Guernica in 1937, everyone knew or else should have known that the emblem of the Next War would be the bomb, the fire from heaven.
So it proved. On September 1, 1939, Germany, in pursuit of imperial ambitions and without warning, launched a savage attack on Poland by land and air. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany. By the end of the month, Germany and its ally Russia had between them defeated and partitioned Poland. Russia then attacked Finland, and in April 1940 Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. For Britain and France the period of inactivity that came to be known as 'The Phoney War' ended in May, when the German Army overran Luxembourg and invaded The Netherlands and Belgium; their armored columns raced for the English Channel. Cut off, the British forces were evacuated by sea, with heavy losses, from Dunkirk, and in June France signed an armistice with Germany. In August, as prelude to an invasion, the German Lujhvaffe (Air Force) attacked England. Over the months that followed, the fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force (RAF) challenged the enemy bombers' nightly blitz of London and other major cities. The Battle of Britain, as it came to be called, cost the Luftwaffe twenty-three hundred planes and the RAF, nine hundred and caused the Germans to abandon their plans for invasion.
In 1941, Virginia Woolf imagined the coming fury, which would be a factor in her suicide. At the end of Woolf's novel Between the Acts, the village pageant of English history is over, and Mr. Streatfield's speech of thanks is interrupted: 'A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead.' The following year Edith Sitwell depicted the blitz in 'Still Falls the Rain,' as did
T. S. Eliot in part 2 of 'Little Gidding.' The Battle of Britain, however, was not the only battle, and British poets were already responding to war on land and at sea as well as in the air. Some of their work shows the
