One of the few lessons I remember from secondary school was a poetry class.
A sheaf of inky photocopies was passed around and, as we read, fidgeting ceased and silence fell. We sat, appalled by the images of war before us, as the stench of battle filled our nostrils, and the wounded and the dead entered our classroom and looked us in the eye.
Like almost all of my generation, Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est was chiselled onto my memory, and not just because we would have to answer an exam question on it. None of us could have read that sickening depiction of a gas attack - "he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning" - or listened to "the monstrous anger of the guns" in Anthem for Doomed Youth, and remained unmoved, though I doubt it occurred to us that Owen was little older than us when he went to fight. Siegfried Sassoon was on the curriculum too, his scathing fury bringing the horror of that conflict so alive it was as if it had happened yesterday.
No anthology of war poetry would be complete without Owen or Sassoon, the preeminent poets of the First World War, and yet it has been announced that the commemoration of the start of that conflict, to be held in Mons in Belgium on August 4, will deliberately exclude both of them. Why?
The organisers of the cultural programme for this event, from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, say that these men's work is not in the spirit of the memorial, since it is deemed too critical.
Instead, it is thought they will read from Margaret Postgate Cole's The Falling Leaves ("I saw the brown leaves dropping from their tree...") or Vera Brittain's elegy to her brother ("Your battle-wounds are scars upon my heart"). In other words, third-rate mawkish poems by those who never held a gun, threw a grenade, or slept in a foot of water swimming with rats. This decision is doubly ironic - offensive indeed - since Sassoon and Owen, although fiercely opposed to the way the war was waged, were both decorated for bravery. Each won the MC and each, after recuperating at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, returning willingly - in Owen's case eagerly - to the front. One could not ask for more honest or more courageous witnesses to war. But truth, as their exclusion shows, is just one more casualty as the anniversary's airbrushing machine grinds into action.
Yet what is the purpose of the Mons memorial if not to remind everyone, on all sides, of the cost of war; of the fact, so clearly stated in Owen's and Sassoon's work, that there are no winners when hostilities are declared, except death? And to remind everyone that it is leaders who create war, not the men who fight them? As Sassoon wrote bitingly in The General: "'Good-morning; good-morning!' the General said/ When we met him last week on our way to the line./ Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,/ And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine./
"'He's a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack/ As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack./ But he did for them both by his plan of attack."
I am incensed to discover that, a century after such fusillades rolled off the press, these poets' work is to be suppressed from cowardly motives, just as it was in their lifetime. Did they and their peers - Edmund Blunden and Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney and Isaac Rosenberg - fight, and write, in vain?
It would seem so. One thing, however, is certain. If the memorial organisers silence the great war poets and replace them with the literary equivalent of The People's Friend, they do a terrible disservice to the memory of all those who died and suffered in that unimaginably barbaric war.
Sadly, I doubt Sassoon would be surprised by the panjandrums' desire to ruffle no political feathers by keeping the day sentimental and safe. As he wrote in Suicide in the Trenches, about a soldier who killed himself and was never spoken of again: "You smug-faced crowds, with kindling eye/Who cheer when soldier lads march by,/Sneak home and pray you'll never know/The hell where youth and laughter go."
Nor will they, if Mons 2014 passes off without a word from him or his kind.
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