'The old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori'

Charterhouse Chronicle
Anthony Symondson
In the middle of the first court of the Imperial War Museum, surrounded by heavy artillery, is a British B-type red London motor-bus that was used on the Western front during the Great War. It is a lovely vehicle with an open top and winding staircase that was built in 1911 and served the route from Willesden to Old Ford. In 1914 it took troops to Antwerp, in 1915 to Ypres, in 1916-17 to the Somme, in 1918 to Amiens, and in 1919 it came home. Named by the soldiers "Ole Bill", after Barnes Bairfeather's cartoon character, it was the first bus to be boarded by King George V in 1920, was then repurchased by the General Omnibus Company, and resumed civilian life until 1924.
When I was a boy it haunted me because most of those who travelled in it were conveyed to an early death in the carnage of the trenches; even now it moves me intensely. The Great War — great in its horror and scientific methods — cast a long shadow. The chivalrous response and gallantry embodied in the phrase Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori —"It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country" — disclosed a failure to understand what modern mass warfare really meant: air raids, submarines, poison gas, long-range artillery. The vision of St George, reared above a battlefield against a blood red sky, in John Hassall's painting, proved a mirage.
The Imperial War Museum's new exhibition Anthem for Doomed Youth concerns "Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War". They are Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, Charles Sorley. Francis Ledwidge, Siegfried Sassoon. Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg and David Jones. There were 400 soldier poets and of the dozen chosen the range of characters and their backgrounds are starkly emphasised. Blunden, Graves and Sorley had Oxford scholarships, Brooke was a Cambridge don, Ledwidge and Rosenberg left school at 12 and 14. Eight were officers, four served in the ranks. Sassoon. Owen and Blunden were decorated with the Military Cross, Grenfell with the Distinguished Service Order. Seven of them died, six were killed in action, and Brooke died of blood poisoning in Greece.
Brooke and Grenfell embodied the romantic ideals of the initial response. Brooke's image of young men "as swimmers into cleanness leaping", is matched by Grenfell's "I adore war. It's a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic". His last words were "Phoebus Apollo", God of the Sun.
Sassoon and Owen described the grim truth. Owen said: "My subject is War — and the pity of War." He believed that "true poets must be truthful". Sassoon identified with the trenches and saw through the complacent rhetoric of Anglican bishops who preached a just cause against the Anti-Christ. "We're none of us the same!" the boys reply./ "For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;/ Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;/ And Bert's gone syphilitic; you'll not find/ A chap who's served that hasn't found some change." And the Bishop said: "The ways of God are strange!"
The majority of the million who died were lads mown down before they knew what life was. "The many men so beautiful," as David Jones put it, "And they all dead did lie:/ And a thousand slimy things/ Lived on; and so did I." It was the death of innocence, and Owen, Sassoon, Ledwidge and Rosenberg spoke for them.
This was brought home to me in a new way when I was based at Stonyhurst, a school with a fine military tradition. The Rhetoricians, or the senior boys, were of the age of the majority of those who died. I remember finding in the archives some Edwardian group-photographs of small boys in a junior corps, dressed like toy soldiers with fife, bugle and drum, and when I took them to the war memorial one after another their names appeared there. The school's War Record told their stories in idealistic terms; but sometimes the reality of their deaths was told by descendants and very ugly their accounts usually were. As Remembrance Sunday approached the Combined Cadet Corps would drill, under the command of Major Cobb, to the stirring beat of a drum that echoed across the misty playing fields and bounced off the yellow-grey stone of the college.
We follow the lives of the poets from the visionary dreams of Brooke and Grenfell; via the Irishman and Scotchman, Ledwidge and Sorley; to the disillusionment of Sassoon, Graves, and Owen. Then comes the blighted ruralism of Blunden, Thomas and Gurney; concluding with Rosenberg who measured his poetry by the light of an inch of candle in the trenches, to the metaphysical and mythical speculations of the Catholic artist, David Jones, who survived until 1975.
All are given life not simply by their manuscripts and letters but by personal belongings. There is Sassoon's Browning pistol and his protest statement against the war; an olive branch from Brooke's grave on Skyros, and two locks of his golden hair, now dulled to brown; a bloodstained map of Belgium belonging to Grenfell. A piano belonging to Gurney; Blunden's uniform tunic; Thomas's watch stopped at the moment of death at Arras from shell blast at 7.36am on 9 April 1917; Graves's knapsack; endless telegrams, and decorations.
Throughout there are paintings by the war artists Paul Nash, Eric Kennington, CRW Nevinson, William Roberts, and vivid pencil sketches of trench rats and comrades-in-arms from Jones's notebooks. The exhibition concludes with a helmet caked in Flanders mud. But perhaps most searing of all is contemporary film of the gassed, shell-shocked, maimed and wounded at military hospitals, shown against the trivial tunes of drawing-room music. Many survivors returned to civilian life, begging in city streets, sometimes pathetically wearing their decorations. I remember them as broken old men. This is one of the best exhibitions I have experienced and it is strongly recommended.
Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War, Imperial War Museum, Lambeth, London, until 27 April 2003.