Owen’s poem of 1917/18 tells the story of what happens to one of the heroes of the Great War once he is wounded and invalided out of the army. It shows in detail the shift from being the heroic young man, proudly showing –off the scrapes of a game of “football” –to a forgotten shell of a man, unable to act for himself and ignored by society as a whole. Owen is warning the reader and invoking pity for the soldiers by showing the stark reality of the Great War. This does not mean that students should consider him a pacifist – nowhere in his poems does he call for an end to war and seek peace, rather he strives to educate the reader to the reality of war once the patriotic jingoism has been removed. Possibly, before reading the poem, students should consider the quotation paraphrased here “if you want to know the reality of war, look in a field hospital”. These words were written in the 1920s by the German Erich Maria Remarque following his experiences in WW1. Owen’s writing seems remarkably prescient.
The poem is focused from the opening word on a soldier – wholly impersonal and therefore representing all soldiers- who is sitting alone in an hospital ward having lost his legs in battle. This man reflects on his past heroics and the current isolation he suffers now that he is fully marginalised from society. Owen is able to reflect his loneliness and also to comment on the nature of the war propaganda which led young men to join the army, even lying about their age with the full connivance of the recruiting officers.
The language in this poem is indicative of the care taken by Owen to find precisely the right words to suit his purpose. Looking closely at Stanza 1 will show what I mean. After the opening word –“He” - which reflects the impersonal nature of the poem Owen’s scene setting introduces a sequence of telling linguistic choices: The soldier waits for “dark”, prefiguring death as well as the end of the day; he wears a “ghastly suit of grey” which not only bleaches colour and strength form the young man but also introduces a sense of the hellish and the ghostly into the poem; The third line, after shocking the reader with the opening “Legless”, breaks half way through – the caesura seeming to reflect the very injury referred to in the line; This sudden break is followed by references to unattainable “voices” of boys and play – the very thing this boy will no longer have access to before Owen uses the verb “mothering” to imply a sense of security and motherly love, both of which he is now denied.
Another feature of the writing is the use of active verbs and euphemism when discussing his injury. He “threw away his knees” as though nothing more than waste paper; he “poured” his blood down shell holes, again making the soldier the agent of his own misfortunes. Owen avoids any graphic description of the wound, instead telling his tale of how it used to be when the boy was carried shoulder high with a “smear” of blood on his thigh –a far cry from the heroic “leap of purple” which “leaps” so athletically from him as he receives his crippling wound. And he sets this against a beautiful and calm image of the “glow-lamps” of the times when the boy was fit and healthy.
Owen also breaks up his syntax in stanza 4 as the young man recalls his enlisting. As he questions his thought processes and realises the vanity and the hypocrisy evident in the process his control falters.
The lines fragment as the sentences become short and broken. In this stanza Owen writes in line 3 a line which manages to look both ways –first explaining the image created in the opening couplet and then, as it moves to line 4 showing the reader that it was on the back of his heroic sporting exploits that the boy “thought he’d better join”. The link is clearly made between sport and the image of war portrayed by the authorities of the time.
This sense of propaganda is carried on into the next stanza and built up to further stress the contrast with his return and the eerie man who “thanked” him – the italics stressing the word possibly to highlight the lack of thanks received form official quarters – before trying to use his injury to engage him in a proselytising exercise.
Left alone in the ward for “a few sick years”, his short life ruined by his actions, the man reflects on his situation. At the end of the poem, after the contrast with the “whole” man which helps to pick up the theme of the poor attitude of the women he has loved to his situation, Owen places the reader into the soldier’s head and forces us to share his anguish. The repeated “why don’t they come?” haunts the reader as it is a question that we simply cannot answer and possibly fear to do so. It is about so much more than bed time – it is about the attitude of those who remained at home and allowed others to fight for them; about those who shy away from the ill, the crippled and the infirm.
Jonathan Peel SGS 2012
