Poppies

Books read this week: Up The Line To Death (9/10)

I think it was Orwell who said that the Great War carefully selected and murdered the million best men in Britain. Around this time every year, I make it a habit to reread Brian Gardner's Up The Line To Death; it's by far my favourite poetry anthology and it never fails to move me.

There's a wide range of different poets here; Sassoon and Owen, obviously, but also Thomas Hardy, Kipling and Yeats, as well as a dozen or so lesser known poets, some of which are superb. As Gardner points out in the introduction, it's impossible to know how many first class poets were cut down, their masterpieces unwritten. It is the feeling of waste, of a criminal waste of talent and youth and innocence, that defines this book.

T.M. Kettle's "To my Daughter Betty" ends with the note "written four days before his death in action, 1916"; even the footnotes are tragic. Looking through the potted biographies at the end, I was struck by how many of the poets were younger than I am now when they died, and it just served to heighten the sense of wasted youth. Wilfred Owen is probably the best poet the English language has ever produced, and he was dead at 25.

The different responses to the horror of war are fascinating; we have Sassoon's bitter satire, Owen's despair, Gibson's superb blending of the horrific with the mundane ("Ginger raised his head/And cursed, and took the bet, and dropt back dead./ We ate our breakfast lying on our backs / Because the shells were screeching overhead.") and Kipling's all-encompassing grief and guilt ("If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied.")

Particular standouts are Owen's Strange Meeting (oddly prophetic in retrospect: I can never read the line "None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress" without thinking of the fascist regimes of the 20s and 30s) and Dulce Et Decorum Est, obviously, as well as The Sentry, Patrick Shaw-Stewart's Untitled poem, which contains one of my favourite couplets ("Was it so hard Achilles, / So very hard to die?"), Wilfred  Gibson's three poems Breakfast, Mad and In The Ambulance, Gilbert Frankau's The Deserter ("And the shameless soul of a nameless man / Went up in the cordite smoke."), Isaac Rosenberg's The Dying Soldier ("We cannot give you water / Were all England in your breath."), Richard Aldington's Sunsets, and most especially E.A. Mackintosh's In Memoriam, which never fails to bring tears to my eyes. There isn't really anything more for me to say, so I'll close with the first verse of In Memoriam:

So you were David's father,
And he was your only son,
And the new-cut peats are rotting
And the work is left undone,
Because of an old man weeping,
Just an old man in pain,
For David, his son David,
That will not come again.

It could stand as the epitaph of a generation.