August is a holiday month in much of Europe. It’s a good time to take stock, read the books that have waited long on the shelf, and explore new places.
The war that is still going on
This August marked one hundred years of the start of the First World War, when the armies of the various European empires went to fight in a war that they expected to be over by Christmas. In July, I saw copies of the sculptures “Grieving Parents” by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz that were being transported from Vladslo in Belgium, where Kollwitz’s son died in the First World War, to Rzhev in Russia where her grandson died in the Second World War.
On 1st August, I attended the opening of a new memorial complex to the First World War in Smargon, north east of Minsk. The town was on the frontline of the Eastern Front for nearly two years and was completely destroyed.
Then a week later, I drove westwards from Minsk to Gdansk via Masuria, north-east Poland, that before 1939 was part of Eastern Prussia, where the first battles of the First World War took place.
I also visited the newly opened museum of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk.
There were extensive commemorations in Britain and other parts of Europe for the start of the First World War. Several British newspapers carried opinion pieces that noted the legacy of the conflict lives on. Despite the terrible experiences of the 20th century wars, there is still fighting in Europe, in south east Ukraine. There are still grieving parents in Europe.
Martial glory or remembrance for the dead?
As I noted in an earlier blog, the experience of the First World War is seared into the imagination of many Britons. I sometimes worry that the history sections of British bookshops have too many books on military history. But we have an outstanding museum – the Imperial War Museum whose aim is “to provide and encourage, the study and understanding of the history of modern war and ‘wartime experience’”.
A colleague pointed out that the narrative from Soviet times in this part of the world is more about martial glory than the pity of war and remembrance for the dead. Having seen many memorials to the Great Patriotic War, I agree that they tend to emphasise the victories rather than commemorate the loss of life. I suppose it’s understandable given that the Red Army was fighting on its homeland.
I’m not sure it is the case with monuments in Belarus. The main sculptures at Smargon include those of ordinary soldiers and of women who suffered in the First World War. The new museum of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk has extensive exhibits about the wider conflict, and even a copy of the secret, additional protocol of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression Pact.
The pity of war in Wilfred Owen’s poetry
The phrase “the pity of war” comes from Wilfred Owen, a British poet of the First World War. I realise that this phrase may need explaining to non-native readers.
It comes from some linesOwen jotted down for a draft preface of a collection of his poems that he hoped to publish:
This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.
Owen served in the British army for the latter two years of the war. He had not enlisted at the start of the war – he was in fact working as a teacher in southern France. However, he felt it was his duty to return home and volunteer – the British government didn’t introduce conscription until 1916.
When Owen reached the frontlines of the Western Front, he was appalled at the conditions he found in the trenches. He wrote extensively about his experiences to his mother, to whom he was close. But he put his most graphic writing into his poems where he wrote very bluntly about the horrors he experienced.
His depiction of a victim of a gas attack in “Dulce et Decorum est”, dreams of meeting an enemy he had killed in “Strange meeting”, or the re-enactment of a funeral ceremony on the battlefield in “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, are powerful.
Owen died just one week before the armistice in 1918. When he died, he was virtually unknown as a poet. But he had met another poet, Siegfried Sassoon, when both were at a hospital in Edinburgh during the war, and Sassoon championed Owen’s poetry after his death. Despite his limited output, Owen is probably the most popular English war poet.
Battles lost and won
In contrast to the First World War, there was an outpouring of books and films glorifying British military successes in the Second World War. Perhaps that is not surprising because the reasons we fought that war were far more obvious – in opposing the ghastliness of the fascist regimes – and there was a clear victory achieved with our Soviet Allies.
That flow had abated by the time I became an adult in the 1980s. Now, our national narrative about the wars of the 20th century – and war in general – is mostly about remembrance of the dead and their sacrifices – the pity of war. As the most distinguished of British generals – the Duke of Wellington, who fought many years against Napoleon’s armies – had said a century earlier: “nothing, except a battle lost, can be half so melancholy as a battle won”.
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