The disconnect between conformity and conscience may not be easy to comprehend.Īs the war neared its end, Sassoon asked himself a hard question: "How could I begin my life all over again, when I had no conviction about anything except that the War was a dirty trick which has been played on me and my generation?" As Glass writes, "The perpetual conflict between the warrior and the pacifist raged within him." Such paradoxes, with fervent warriors who don't necessarily believe in the war they're fighting, give us a lot to think about in our own time. Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course. Owen's 1918 poem " Strange Meeting," which imagines a meeting in the afterlife with an enemy soldier he had killed, not only "revealed a poetic genius," Glass observes, "but also guilt at killing even as he engaged it." Owen, in command of a platoon, was determined to prove himself the epitome of courage rather than cowardice - an excellent commander and killer - yet his poetry depicted the results as hellish rather than glorious. Yet both Owen and Sassoon were fierce and daring fighters who led men into battle, even as remorse hovered. To children ardent for some desperate glory, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,. If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodĬome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin If in some smothering dreams, you too could paceĪnd watch the white eyes writhing in his face, Owen's most famous poem ends with a Latin phrase (taken from the Roman poet Horace) that translates as "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country." It concludes with a stanza describing the death of a fellow soldier following a poison gas attack: He was killed in action just days before the November 1918 armistice, at age 26. Owen wrote his poems during lulls in combat. Owen, more reluctantly, also returned to the bloody grind of trench warfare. Sassoon, a half-dozen years older than Owen, went public with his opposition to the war after experiencing its horrors in battlefields of France - yet later, after some recuperation, he chose to go back into combat. The book focuses largely on Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, probably the two most renowned poets of that dreadful war, who met at Craiglockhart and developed a close bond. Yet as Glass writes, "many of the 'cured' officers from Craiglockhart suffered trauma for the rest of their lives." The treatment was advanced and enlightened. Aiming to help officers who'd been traumatized in battle, Craiglockhart War Hospital treated 1,801 of them during a 30-month period. Two years after war broke out in 1914, the British government set up an innovative mental institution (for "officers only") in Scotland. And whether we use the term "shell shock" or PTSD, the human consequences for those who fight, even when they survive, are evaded by top officials who order young people to kill. Despite the differences between the eras, the continuities are deeply significant, starting with the reality that wars are still war and humans are still human. Patriotism and war: Can America break that deadly connection?īy telling "A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War" - the subtitle of his book - Glass (a veteran journalist who has covered wars in the Middle East and the Balkans) offers an opportunity for us to compare then and now.
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