Yesterday in Dunblane Cathedral the minister prefaced his homily, mischievously, as is sometimes his wont, with the remark, “You know, I’m not very good at forward planning. If I was, I would have anticipated today’s lectionary and made sure I was on holiday.” Not that Church of Scotland ministers need necessarily stick to the prescribed texts, one of which was Genesis 22: 1-14, but in the event he bit the bullet and talked about Abraham’s abortive attempt to immolate his only beloved son on the altar of… well, of what, exactly? What would be worth such a sacrifice?
It’s a well-known tale but, if you don’t know it, may I refer you to Wilfred Owen’s poem The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, which recounts the tale faithfully in fourteen terse lines, after the manner of a sonnet, and then adds a couplet and a fatal twist, literally a fatal twist, at the end. From a technical point of view, Owen clearly recognised the enormous power of the 1611 King James translation, and plundered it, piecemeal and wholesale. It is a story often recounted by people who are antagonistic towards religion of any description, to demonstrate that the God of the Old Testament is a Nasty Piece of Work, and his acolytes not much better. I was intrigued to hear whether the minister in Dunblane would attempt some sort of justification for the behaviour of the protagonists, and I confess I attempted to send him a telepathic message: “Remember the words of Alexander Pope:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
So talk about Wilfred Owen!” He didn’t. But he is a remarkably gifted man and he certainly needed no help from me.
Owen’s theme is always the same – the pity, and the futility, of war. Even when, ostensibly, he is not writing a war poem, he always returns to the war. Take Miners.
There was a whispering in my hearth,
A sigh of the coal,
Grown wistful of a former earth
It might recall…
Then, midway through the poem, an abrupt change of tone:
But the coals were murmuring of their mine,
And moans down there
Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men
Writhing for air.
And I saw white bones in the cinder-shard.
Bones without number…
Similarly, The Parable of the Old Man and the Young only becomes a war poem in its last couplet.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Sometimes with Owen there is a stark and sudden flash of anger. It is at its most explicit in the most uncompromising of all his poems, with its grim exposure of “The Old Lie”, Dulce et Decorum Est.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning…
I dare say Siegfried Sassoon, a harder, harsher poet than Owen, must have greatly admired Dulce et Decorum Est.
Owen depicts the war as an act of gross abuse perpetrated by the old upon the young. Wars are fought by youth. In the Battle of Britain, most of the “few” were barely out of their teens. The old are not conscripted. I wonder why not? I suppose an old man, or woman, handed a tin hat and a rifle, would say, “What am I supposed to do with these?” Two of the compensations of growing old are that you are unlikely to be called for jury service, and unlikely to be called up. The young do well to be critical of their elders when failed policy and failed diplomacy plunge the world into war. Perhaps we are witnessing something similar across the world when every year statesmen and diplomats jet into exotic locations for a Conference of the Parties, and proceed to ratify a piece of humbug. Blah blah blah. The world is on fire, and it is the young who will pay the price.
Benjamin Britten set Owen’s The Parable of the Old Man and the Young in the Offertorium, part of his War Requiem. The setting is surrounded by the echoing choir of young boys and their ghostly chant of the Latin Requiem Mass. War always looks futile, even absurd, from a distance. Nowadays we think of the Great War as complete madness, a grotesque Blackadder sketch. Field Marshall Viscount Montgomery thought the generals of the first war were complete amateurs. Thirty thousand British soldiers, said Monty in his wide-eyed way, were killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, before lunch.
“Before lunch!”
And the Second World War was partly made possible by the crippling reparations exacted by the Treaty of Versailles, resulting in the sort of inflation which threatened to price a loaf of bread at around a billion Deutschmarks. Churchill of all people called the second war “the unnecessary war”.
I was intrigued to hear that a stash of wrecked Hurricane fighter planes have been found in a gorge in Ukraine. A large number of them were shipped across to the Soviet Union during the war, to assist in the war against Nazi Germany. And now we are sending ordnance and matériel to assist in the defence of Ukraine against Russian aggression. Who was it said that history does not repeat itself, but sometimes rhymes?
Or perhaps, as with Wilfred Owen’s poetry, half-rhymes.
jamescalumcampbell 