Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est, Pro patria mori.
This poem is, of course, Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen. A lot of people know it, or have heard of it, as many students look at Owen in British Schools. As a result of this, the quality of this poetry is quickly discarded by people who, having studied this in school, forget about it as a part of the rest of their (apparently) largely useless education. This is a disaster. Nothing less.
Most patriotic types (I admit, I used to fall for it) look at the poetry of Rupert Brooke (absolutely superb poet in his own right) and look closer at it because it falls closer to their idea of what war is. It is not a horrific, wasteful sacrifice, but a glorious route to infamy.*
* * * * *
I went to the French ‘Great War’ (First World War to most) battlefields at Easter. It’s taken this long for me to really start to appreciate this trip. Initially, I approached the trip from an historical perspective, as I have a fair interest in military history. During the trip, I looked at the battlefields, compared them to the maps we had and, of course, looked at the scenes from a photographer’s perspective. It was in my opinion, the making of myself as a serious photographer in a sense.
The way I photographed was a challenging one, and in a way the way I did it was entirely subconscious. I was trying to photograph people. People who had died on those fields nearly 100 years ago. Still at that time, an event in living memory. This is a challenge at the best of times, but trying to capture how people were when they simply aren’t there to be photographed is even harder. Very quickly it becomes apparent, as you look at the great memorials erected to the dead, that the death in war is no glorious route to infamy. Rather, you disappear into the mists of time faster than any other man. Who can name 10 men who have died from any one war? I’ll bet that not many can name five who died in the current war in Afghanistan. Only those who have seen their friends killed, or those who depend on these people as friends and family.
Only recently was I reminded of this trip by a program the BBC showed last month about Wilfred Owen’s poems and life. All of a sudden, things started to tally up in my mind. Cognitions are still happening now, so you may only get the half-baked idea here.
For some time, I have wanted to go out to places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Initially as a soldier, later as a photographer in the military. But having thought about it, I am not intending to do either of those things. I want to follow in the footsteps of Phillip Jones Griffiths, Don McCullin and the like. These men went unaided through hostile territory, not always under the guard or protection of allied troops, in order to get the true images of war. They are seldom attractive, in McCullin’s** case they are nearly always decidedly ugly. But what makes these men great photographers is not the way they photographed war, it is the way they photographed people. It was for precisely this reason that they became hated by allied governments, because they were lifting the lid on what it was really like to fight and die for your country. In Griffiths’ case, it*** resulted in him being banned from ever entering Vietnam again, a ruling by the USA, shamefully backed up by Britain. That didn’t stop him though. After the conflict was over, he returned to survey the damage. Not the physical damage to the landscape and infrastructure, but to the people. This is the most important thing for the photographer in my mind: To record people and humanity.
To record mankind at its worse is an extreme and risky occupation, but only through exposing what war is really about can we ever hope to stop this primitive, disgusting and hateful habit of humanity to refuse to rise above our base instincts.
Wilfred Owen died seven days before the end of the war.
End of essay. Take care.
Notes:
*The poem I had specifically in mind was The Soldier:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave once her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Wilfred Owen produced what I see as a response to this:
An Imperial Elegy
Not one corner of a foreign field
But a span as wide as Europe;
An appearance of a titan's grave,
And the length thereof a thousand miles,
It crossed all Europe like a mystic road,
Or as the Spirits' Pathway lieth on the night.
And I heard a voice crying
This is the Path of Glory.
**The best book of Don McCullin’s photographs is called ‘Don McCullin’. This way you not only get to see this man’s poignant photographs of (numerous) war(s), you get to see his other captures, of tribes-people of Irian Jaya and his gorgeous landscapes of Somerset, which deserve a rich recognition in their own right.
***’It’ being his book, Vietnam Inc. This was published in the US and UK, and really exposed the vile way the US military behaved in Vietnam. It turned public opinion at the time, yet despite this it is largely forgotten because it doesn’t suit people’s golden delusions of what war is about. Please don’t just look up his (Phillip Jones Griffiths’) photos on the internet, as the book gives far more context. It is worth the money either buying or leasing a copy. For any budding photojournalist it is a must, for any pacifist, it would make interesting reading, for any soldier, it would make a vital study in the ethics of how not to conduct a war.
