conflict ‘men whom the war had
ruined . . . who incorporated the renovating ideals of the socialist tradition, the cult of the earth, the taste of violence that had grown in the mud of the trenches.’
‘That was a laugh,’ remarked a German soldier on being told the war was over. ‘We ourselves are the war.’
In London the Armistice Day ceremonies of 1921 had been disrupted by a demonstration by the unemployed, whose placards read: ‘The Dead are remembered but we are
forgotten.’ In one of his
Last Poems
, published posthumously in 1932 (the year after Blunden’s edition of Owen), D. H. Lawrence presents a prophetic vision of the deepening
depression and political unrest of the thirties as an expression of the ‘disembodied rage’ of the dead who died in vain, who ‘moan and throng in anger’. Never explicitly
identified with the war, these ‘unhappy dead’ are yet impossible to disassociate from it. Set on a ‘day of the dead’ in November, the poem makes it seem as if the army of
the surrogate dead that marched past the Cenotaph has now joined the massed ranks of the disillusioned, the unemployed, the dispossessed. The war thatwas to end all wars will
lead inexorably to another, a world made safe for democracy seethes with this betrayal of the discontented dead:
Oh, but beware, beware the angry dead.
Who knows, who knows how much our modern woe is due to the angry, unappeased dead
that were thrust out of life, and now come back at us malignant, malignant, for we will not succour them.
In the face of unemployment, inflation and the other indignities and privations of peacetime, the shared suffering of the trenches offered an almost mythic embodiment of total belonging: the
immersion of the individual within a rigidly hierarchical community of equals. For the movement that articulated this ideal in Germany, peace was a continuation of the war by means which,
ultimately, led to its full-scale resumption after a simmering twenty-year interlude.
Sassoon had noted how soldiers became almost happy in the knowledge that they were abandoning their own volition to the directives of the army; Nazism subsumed the individual will to the will of
the Reich, the Führer. An ideological imperative was built from the martial ideal of obedience which the army had instilled in its soldiers.
‘The Third Reich comes from the trenches,’ said Rudolf Hess. But so too does the end of the idea of obedience as unequivocally heroic. A British survivor of the Somme remembers
how
the war changed me – it changed us all . . . Everybody ought to have this military training. It would do them good and make them obedient. Some of
the young men now, they need obedience. They don’t know what it is. Our lives were all obedience.
The passage contains its own implicit contradiction, yielding where it seeks to uphold, tacitly acknowledging that it was precisely the experience of the Great War that brought obedience and
servitude into tainted proximity. Henceforth obedience would have some of the qualities of submission and complicity – culminating, for victims and perpetrators alike, in the Holocaust
– and all heroism would have about it some of the quality of refusal, rebellion and – a key term in the next war –
resistance
. D. H. Lawrence had noticed this submissive
quality of courage among recruits in Cornwall: ‘They are all so brave, to suffer,’ he wrote in July 1916, ‘but none of them brave enough, to reject suffering.’
Perhaps the real heroes of 1914–18, then, are those who refused to obey and to fight, who actively rejected the passivity forced upon them by the war, who reasserted their right not to
suffer, not to have things done to them.
Which is why, despite a series of diversions, wrong turnings and U-turns, I made such an effort to find the village of Bailleulmont.
In the communal cemetery there, tucked away from the tangle of civilian graves, is a group of military
ruined . . . who incorporated the renovating ideals of the socialist tradition, the cult of the earth, the taste of violence that had grown in the mud of the trenches.’
‘That was a laugh,’ remarked a German soldier on being told the war was over. ‘We ourselves are the war.’
In London the Armistice Day ceremonies of 1921 had been disrupted by a demonstration by the unemployed, whose placards read: ‘The Dead are remembered but we are
forgotten.’ In one of his
Last Poems
, published posthumously in 1932 (the year after Blunden’s edition of Owen), D. H. Lawrence presents a prophetic vision of the deepening
depression and political unrest of the thirties as an expression of the ‘disembodied rage’ of the dead who died in vain, who ‘moan and throng in anger’. Never explicitly
identified with the war, these ‘unhappy dead’ are yet impossible to disassociate from it. Set on a ‘day of the dead’ in November, the poem makes it seem as if the army of
the surrogate dead that marched past the Cenotaph has now joined the massed ranks of the disillusioned, the unemployed, the dispossessed. The war thatwas to end all wars will
lead inexorably to another, a world made safe for democracy seethes with this betrayal of the discontented dead:
Oh, but beware, beware the angry dead.
Who knows, who knows how much our modern woe is due to the angry, unappeased dead
that were thrust out of life, and now come back at us malignant, malignant, for we will not succour them.
In the face of unemployment, inflation and the other indignities and privations of peacetime, the shared suffering of the trenches offered an almost mythic embodiment of total belonging: the
immersion of the individual within a rigidly hierarchical community of equals. For the movement that articulated this ideal in Germany, peace was a continuation of the war by means which,
ultimately, led to its full-scale resumption after a simmering twenty-year interlude.
Sassoon had noted how soldiers became almost happy in the knowledge that they were abandoning their own volition to the directives of the army; Nazism subsumed the individual will to the will of
the Reich, the Führer. An ideological imperative was built from the martial ideal of obedience which the army had instilled in its soldiers.
‘The Third Reich comes from the trenches,’ said Rudolf Hess. But so too does the end of the idea of obedience as unequivocally heroic. A British survivor of the Somme remembers
how
the war changed me – it changed us all . . . Everybody ought to have this military training. It would do them good and make them obedient. Some of
the young men now, they need obedience. They don’t know what it is. Our lives were all obedience.
The passage contains its own implicit contradiction, yielding where it seeks to uphold, tacitly acknowledging that it was precisely the experience of the Great War that brought obedience and
servitude into tainted proximity. Henceforth obedience would have some of the qualities of submission and complicity – culminating, for victims and perpetrators alike, in the Holocaust
– and all heroism would have about it some of the quality of refusal, rebellion and – a key term in the next war –
resistance
. D. H. Lawrence had noticed this submissive
quality of courage among recruits in Cornwall: ‘They are all so brave, to suffer,’ he wrote in July 1916, ‘but none of them brave enough, to reject suffering.’
Perhaps the real heroes of 1914–18, then, are those who refused to obey and to fight, who actively rejected the passivity forced upon them by the war, who reasserted their right not to
suffer, not to have things done to them.
Which is why, despite a series of diversions, wrong turnings and U-turns, I made such an effort to find the village of Bailleulmont.
In the communal cemetery there, tucked away from the tangle of civilian graves, is a group of military
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