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The First World War, the international conflict that spanned from 1914 to 1918, remains an important part of historical and cultural memory even today. Its significance is only intensified by its enduring mythic status as the “Great War” of recent history. While there are endless sources available for studying World War I, the literature of the time period offers responses to the war different in intensity and emotion than any historical text. It shows not battle plans and casualty lists, but human response to the devastating experience of warfare. But First World War literature, in particular, proves that such experiences make any response difficult, demonstrating a complex thematic relationship between a desire to communicate and an inability to do so. The poetry and fiction of World War I represent soldiers silenced, in many ways, by their first-hand knowledge of the war. Images of silence permeate this literature, implying that the experience of the soldier is somehow unimaginable or untellable, but not only because of its distressing nature. War literature, like soldiers themselves, is faced with the task of communicating to ignorant civilians the incredible violence and horror of the front. The combination of the inability to speak and the lack of listener understanding leads to the literary formation of a generation of soldiers cut off from home, their past, and, in effect, their future in a civilian culture that cannot hear them. …then a bang
In this passage, the shot itself is only onomatopoetically defined, identified by its crude noise instead of a clear designation. After he is hit, the soldier falls to the ground and into an extension of his former muteness. Now he “grunts” and “chokes” instead of speaking, and even this noise is “lost” among the voices of others and the throes of death. Closely related to the silence of death in these poems is another form of silence: inarticulation. Much like the soldier in “Counter-Attack” who can only “grunt” and “choke,” many others cannot express themselves or communicate their experiences because of a blatant inability to speak, even if they remain alive. This inarticulation can be caused by injury, as in “Counter-Attack,” or by a condition Owen presents in “The Calls.” Here he depicts the majority of soldiers as unable to communicate their experiences due to the lack of a more poetic voice: For leaning out
last midnight on my sill The soldiers are
unable to “speak” their own stories, and so their calls reach Owen and
prompt him to speak for them. He
answers this call althou Although it is part of the war poet’s duty to speak for the silent soldiers, at times this duty is left deliberately unfulfilled. The poetry of Owen and Sassoon is filled with imagery of horrendous violence and carnage, the sights of warfare civilians never know. But even though these poems do communicate these sights, they sometimes express a wish to do just the opposite: to hide them from the audience, both reader and civilian. In the sonnet “Remorse,” Sassoon first describes a soldier’s experience, sparing neither visual imagery nor private thoughts. The poem shows the soldier remembering and reliving a battle scene: Remembering how
he saw those Germans run, The scene is presented in a manner that emphasizes the appalling facts of warfare by contrasting the description of the Germans with the self-description of the English as “chaps,” a thoroughly good-natured, civilian term. The army is, in actuality, not a bunch of “chaps” but of soldiers, acting as they must in a time of war. However, “chaps” may be the word families and supporters on the home front would use to describe the army. Those away from the front, those who never witness actual fighting, are completely deluded about the nature of the war. But this ignorance is only promoted by the decision of the soldier to continue keeping these facts from those at home: “‘there’s things in war one dare not tell / Poor father sitting safe at home, who reads / Of dying heroes and their deathless deeds’” (12-14). This inclination to protect those at home from the reality of war actually contributes to civilian naivete. Lane argues, “it is common decency itself which, on the personal level, helps to maintain a state of ignorance on the home front” (103). In cases such as this, soldiers are silencing themselves instead of, as in “The Calls,” crying out to be heard.
These two divergent tendencies produce disastrous results as soldiers
must reconcile their untold experiences at war with misconceptions at
home. As Sassoon shows in “Remorse,” the home front
views soldiers as “dying heroes” and their exploits as “deathless deeds.”
These idealistic notions of the war are mere delusions fueled by
a combination of propagandistic discourse about the war from official
sources and other, pre-war poetry, like that of Rupert Brooke.
Brooke’s war sonnets were published in 1914, very early in the
war; and unlike Owen and Sassoon, Brooke saw only one day of limited combat
experience before his death
When soldiers are forced to relate their experiences to a society
that has only vague and idealistic notions about the war, they find that
there is no appropriate place for reality.
Consequently, the realities of war must be No, no, not that,—it’s
bad to think of war, Thus “jabbering” about one’s war
experience is a sign of madness that soldiers, in a society that does
not want to hear of their experiences, must avoid by repressing their
thoughts. This mechanism, however, begins to break down
by the end of the poem when the image of the You’re quiet
and peaceful, summering safe at home; This breakdown is precipitated not only by the sounds of the guns but also by the appearance of the first-person speaker, the soldier who is finally trying to voice his previously repressed thoughts. But inarticulation here follows repression; the soldier speaks in short, choppy bursts accented by exclamations and more onomatopoetic descriptions of the guns. Repression and the refusal to relate the entire truth of war experiences are two types of silence shared by society and the individual soldiers alike. But society plays another role as well, a role that further silences soldiers by refusing to listen to their stories and therefore continuing the blissful ignorance of the home front. Sassoon relates, even in prose, this phenomenon as he experienced it during sick leave: How had Uncle
Hamo and Mr. Horniman managed, I wondered, to make the war seem so different
from what it really was? It wasn’t
possible to imagine oneself even hinting to them, that the Somme Battle
was—to put it mildly—an inhuman and beastly business.
One had to behave nicely about it to them, keeping up a polite
pretence that to have taken part in it was a glorious and acceptable adventure….I
had felt that no explanation of mine could ever reach my elders—that they weren’t capable of wanting to know the
truth. (qtd. in Lane 101,
my italics) Because of their idealistic expectations
and thoughts about the war, those on the home front forced soldiers to
silence the truth while speaking aloud an absurd lie. Society then dictates a fiction, a propagandistic
view, construing the deaths of millions of people into a “Great War.”
In his poem “They,” Sassoon Owen, too, addresses the gulf between civilian thoughts on war and actual war experience. In “The Send-Off,” Owen depicts a town witnessing a train of soldiers departing. The soldiers are characterized as “wrongs hushed-up” as they leave for battle (11), a description that displays Owen’s views about the role of the soldier. The image of silence used here—“hushed-up”—is different from one used later in the poem—“A few, a few, too few for drum and yells, / May creep back, silent, to village wells” (18-19). The earlier image describes the way the soldiers were sent, portraying them as passive subjects of enforced silence: they are “hushed-up” by another, more official force. There is little ceremony to see these soldiers off; adopting the voice of the town itself, the speaker of the poem states, “They were not ours: / We never heard to which front these were sent” (12-13). Owen's manuscripts demonstrate how he labored on these lines, not formulating We never heard until later drafts. When he did, he was doubtless satisfied with its literal as well as metaphorical meanings. In this poem, silence affects everyone involved: the soldiers, the officials, and the society that never hears of these boys again.
These many forms of silence all lead to one other: the officiated, bureaucratic, clinical silence—an almost Orwellian “retranslation” of experience into arrested language. This silence is actually an example of official voice; it withholds the truth of the war by giving only vague and incomplete information. When the soldiers themselves are repressed, inarticulate, or dead, this voice is the only one to be heard, much as it is in Sassoon’s “Counter-Attack.” This poem, which clearly shows the silence of death, ends not with the soldier’s fall but with the sterilized line, “The counter-attack had failed” (39). By relegating the defeat, and the soldier’s death, to the realm of military strategy, the official voice ignores and conceals the brutality of warfare. But the poem’s movement seems to show that this is the only voice left to speak about the war, especially when the soldiers themselves are “Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans” (37).
The poetry of Sassoon and Owen exhibits a tension between these
many forms of silence and the poets’ telling of their experiences. But this tension also demonstrates the special role the war poets
played in World War I—they spoke for those who could not. The lack of language could be dangerous for
the returning soldiers; if they could not communicate their experiences,
they could easily be ignored. But
World War I poets gave civilian society linguistic proof—the exact form
of proof that silenced soldiers lacked—that the horrors of the war did happen. Owen and Sassoon’s
duty was to break the silence by speaking about it, by speaking for the
inarticulate, repressed, and dead. And
it was this, as Owen This isolation occurs on three levels: from home, from civilian individuals, and from other generations. And just as the forms of silence are most clearly presented in First World War poetry, its effects are revealed in the fiction of that same era. The works of the authors Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and Erich Maria Remarque all explore the issues of silence and isolation, although these themes are certainly not limited to these three writers. Their works “Soldier’s Home,” Mrs. Dalloway, and All Quiet on the Western Front, however, are here offered as examples of the literary themes of silence and isolation.
Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s Home” illustrates the isolation
of a soldier from his home. This
is not to say that the main charact The main character of “Soldier’s Home,” Harold Krebs, does return to the place of home, but he cannot recover the idea of home. After his return from the war, much later than many other soldiers, Krebs finds it impossible to connect with those at home, a result of the silence that now pervades his relations to them. His silence takes many forms. Initially, he refuses to talk about his experience, but he later discovers that the town would silence his truthful accounts even if he did try to speak them: At first Krebs,
who had been at Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Champagne, St. Mihiel and
in the Argonne did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it.
His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by
actualities. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after
he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and talking
about it. (111) Because the town expects a certain type of war story (or fiction), Krebs’ reality means little and is of little value. “Soldier’s Home” is a post-War story, and so the fiction the townspeople expect, and demand, is one not of glory but of extravagant “atrocities.” But even these expectations, like those depicted in World War I poetry, work to conceal the truth of the war. As Krebs’ silence deepens, he becomes more and more distanced from his family, friends, and “home.” He cannot make a full return to civilian life; even the girls he sees walking down the street make him think that “the world they were in was not the world he was in” (113). He is not merely separated from the individual girls; he is separated from their entire way of life. The expanse separating Krebs from a “normal,” civilian life is only broadened when he feels it is not worth the trouble of talking to them, knowing before he begins that they will not understand. Instead of trying to connect with the girls or even his immediate family, Krebs buries himself in studying the war and reading about the battles he has seen first hand: “Now he was really learning about the war” (113). Not only has Krebs separated himself from people, but he now also has begun to distance himself from his actual experiences, feeling that “real” learning about the war can only come from history books. He is himself silencing the reality of his experience in favor of the historical, official accounts of the war.
Krebs’ distance from those at home transcends a mere personal level
and in fact includes the very notion of “home.”
However, this separation from home necessarily means separation
from individuals as well. Although
Hemingway shows this, too, in “Soldier’s Home,” a more distinct example
is Septimus’ condition is worsened by his wife’s inability to understand him. She tries to reach him, to follow the doctors’ orders to bring him out of his “funk,” but because she does not comprehend why he is becoming distanced and isolated from her and the rest of humanity, she cannot reach him, or, correspondingly, be reached by him. In his isolation, Septimus comes to a realization about life that he wishes to share with Rezia and the rest of the world. Unfortunately, his silence is so profound that he is unable to do so effectively. Even in the moment of his insight he is alone with only the image of his dead friend Evans to share it with: It was at that moment (Rezia gone shopping)
that the great revelation took place. A voice spoke from behind the screen. Evans was speaking. The
dead were with him. It is significant that Septimus’ revelation takes place while he is alone, especially because what he realizes is that “now he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know” (140). When Rezia returns, bearing flowers she “had had to buy” (a duty reminiscent of Clarissa’s relatively trivial early morning excursion), Septimus tries to tell her of his revelation. He mutters, ironically unable to communicate that “Communication is health; communication is happiness, communication—”, but he does not finish his thought because Rezia can answer only with, “What are you saying, Septimus?” (141). She does not understand, only confirming his conclusion that the “brute” of human nature had won. He cannot tell Rezia, he cannot tell the doctors; he has fallen completely into the “isolation full of sublimity.” Some of his last thoughts before his suicide are, “Only human beings—what did they want?” (226). The isolation Septimus feels is not exclusive to the present time; he feels as if even the past and future are also lost for him, and by extension, for the generation of boys who became soldiers in World War I. When Septimus returned home, he also attempted to return to Shakespeare, to Keats, to Dante, to the great authors of the past who had intoxicated him when he was younger. But he finds that he cannot; because he has changed, their messages to him have changed as well: Here he opened
Shakespeare once more. That boy’s
business of the intoxication of language—Antony
and Cleopatra—had shrivelled utterly.
How Shakespeare loathed humanity—the putting on of clothes, the
getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message
hidden in the beauty of words. The
secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next
is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante
the same. Aeschylus (translated)
the same. (133-134)
Septimus not only cannot connect with his personal past—his childhood enjoyment of these authors—but he is also cut off from a collective literary past, condemning not only himself but his entire generation to “that eternal suffering, that eternal loneliness” (37). And with no literary past, there is no literary future: “because he could see no future for a poet in Stroud” (127). Through Septimus, Woolf demonstrates the far-reaching and destructive effects of war. This theme of generational isolation is not limited to Woolf’s work, nor to British or American authors. The German author Remarque addresses this same question of the place of the soldier generation in All Quiet on the Western Front. This novel shows the same effects of war—silence and subsequent isolation—as they happen to “enemy” soldiers. The main character of All Quiet is the young Paul Baumer, who enlisted in the army with the rest of his high school class. The novel, told as Paul’s first person narrative, vividly, and sometimes agonizingly, describes his experiences on the front, his trips home, and ultimately his death. The story allows readers access to Paul’s private thoughts, thoughts that he cannot always express to other characters in the novel. He must contend with a home front culture that has only one conception of the war: “So you come from the front? What is the spirit like out there? Excellent, eh? Excellent?” (166). When confronted with this idea that the war, especially the front, is a means to inspire courage and patriotism in young men, Paul can only respond that “the war may be rather different from what people think,” but this idea is quickly “dismissed” by the people at home (167). Like the English boys in Sassoon’s “They,” Paul must confront, repeatedly, idealistic notions of the war from those who will never see the actual horrors of battle. Being forced into propagandistic images of the war leaves Paul feeling like a foreigner in his childhood home. He feels that he is not himself among his family and familiar objects (160), that it is impossible to connect to what he once loved. And like Septimus, Paul is acutely aware of his isolation from his books: Wearily I stand up and look out of
the window. Then I take one of
the books, intending to read, and turn over the leaves. But I put it away and take out another. There are passages in it that have been marked. I look, turn over the pages, take up fresh
books. Already they are piled
up beside me. Speedily more join
the heap, papers, magazines, letters. Paul, too, has lost his literary and cultural past, detached from what he once loved and what once connected him to eras other than his own. He feels that he has only one thing left: “I am a soldier,” he says, “I must cling to that” (173). He has nothing but his identity as a soldier remaining of himself; his former identity as son, brother, and student is now lost forever. The war has changed him from civilian to soldier.
This change, however, is not exclusive to Paul; he speaks of it
as a characteristic of his generation.
He speaks of himself and his “comrades” as a unit that has shared
both experiences and effects: “We are forlorn like children, and experienced
like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we
are lost” (123). These young boys
are “ Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way any more. And men will not understand us—for
the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years
with us already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old
occupations, and the war will be forgotten—and the generation that has
grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside.
We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a
few will adapt themselves, some others will nearly submit, and most will
be bewildered;—the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into
ruin. (294) The new identity of soldier, which has so effectively erased any former identity soldiers of Paul’s age had had before World War I, will eventually differentiate them from the rest of society. If like Paul they all cling to being soldiers, they will never fit into a civilian society, especially one that refused to hear the truth about the war. Their untold experiences have changed them irrevocably, and even as years pass by, they will remain “rootless” and “bewildered,” lost without a past or future other than that of the soldier. The identity of the soldier in World War I literature is inextricable from the themes of isolation and silence, which is why it is perhaps most appropriate to end this discussion with All Quiet on the Western Front. Even when the many forms of silence mute the soldiers and deafen their audiences, the official voice will always remain, the voice that explains how one should think about the war by offering only clinical, vague, and unemotional accounts of the experiences of the battlefield. So it is for Paul. When he finally falls, his own voice necessarily stops, and all we are left with is a detached description of his death. It is a description that resonates not for its flamboyance or its keen observation but instead for its silence. It says little, it shows less, and yet it truthfully portrays the state of the unknown and unheard soldier: He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. (296) Brooke,
Rupert. Field, Frank. British and French writers of the First World War: Comparative studies in cultural history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Groves, Paul. “Introduction to First World War Poetry.” Virtual Seminars for Teaching English. Oxford University. 19 November 1999. 18 March 2002. -----. The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive. Oxford University. 26 November 1999. 18 March 2002. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1995. -----. “Soldier’s Home.” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. The Finca Vigía Edition. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1987. Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Lane, Arthur E. An Adequate Response: The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972. Owen,
Wilfred. Press, John. Poets of World War I. Windsor, Berkshire, England: Profile Books, Ltd., 1983. Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. Trans. A. W. Wheen. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1975. Sassoon,
Siegfried. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1953.
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gh,
in the poem, he had ignored several other, more official ones:
in that same year.
repressed,
another form of silence that further contributes to civilian ignorance.
trees
explores
the contrast between civilian or official rhetoric of the war with the
actual experience of “the boys” who fought it.
shows
in “The Calls,” that they viewed as their duty.
er
is merely disconnected from his family, although that is a part of the
tension of the story.
Septimus
Warren Smith in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
lost”
in an isolated, liminal identity that makes them unable to go home, to
go back to what was once familiar to them, or to imagine a future for
themselves.