in The Ampersand 6 (July 2001)

In one of his more famous poems, W. H. Auden concluded that "Poetry makes nothing happen." What he failed to say is that he was only talking about the kind of poetry he was writing. In the 20^th-century, one kind of poetry did make something very important happen. By the end of the century, it had completely changed the way Western nations fight wars.

"Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge . . ." No, not some skid row derelict tottering toward the dumpster behind your building, but the mutilated figures of soldiers in the First World War. Or so it's recorded in Wilfrid Owen's bitter, ironic poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est" (1917).

Or this, from Siegfried Sassoon's "Repression of War Experience" (1918), spoken by a Tommy suffering from shell shock:

These are voices, and poetry, that will never be heard again from the wars the armed forces of the leading nations engage in today. And thank god for that. But think for a moment what actual effect that poetry has had.

For one thing, the Americans, we Canadians, the British, the French, the Germans no longer put our soldiers in harm's way in any significant or sustained way. If our troops die or are injured, it's usually by accident, suicide, or by individual acts of terrorism, like the mad assault of the suicide bombers on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen. A Canadian soldier, it turns out, has more to fear from the office politics in the field, as in the incident, that came to light last year, of the poisoning by some privates of their gung-ho noncom in Croatia. His aggressiveness was too robust for the shrinking violets under him.

And why will we never hear the cries of pain and dismay from Owen's and Sassoon's soldiers again? Precisely because poets like Owen, Sassoon, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney, and many others, for the first time, made war casualties a major political issue that could not be swept under the carpet or explained away by generals and politicians. It was because the poets and novelists brought the horror to the home front in some of the most powerful literature written this century that the conduct of war in the West has undergone a remarkable change.

Owen's "doomed youth" and the passion play of remembrance we enact every November are the principal reasons why we'll never have to "hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs" of our dying soldiers again. Today our biggest problem seems to be keeping the troops focused and entertained in order to defeat the boredom that leads to things like the insane conduct of our paratroopers in Somalia. No poetry will ever come from men who beat teenagers to death for sport.

The legacy of the poets in the Great War lies in bringing to general notice the suffering of individual soldiers. In fact, that is the way we now primarily remember that far-off war. For the one person who can tell you something about the political crisis which led to war in 1914, there are a thousand, or perhaps even ten thousand, who can bring a tear to your eye by recounting the trench experience of those wasted "citizens of death's grey land."

Even the institutions, like museums, that keep alive memories as a professional duty have given way to this radical personalizing of war. A quick look at the Imperial War Museum in London, England, for example, reveals this change of emphasis well. Amid the memorabilia of weapons, uniforms, vehicles, documents, photographs, and other objets de guerre, the visitor will now find, in the lower floors, a life size re-creation of a First World War trench from the Western Front.

You can now walk into the trenches and see for yourself the wretchedness faced by the millions who served in Flanders Fields. The exhibit not only puts you in the trench where the soldiers were forced to sleep, eat, and endure bombardment, but it also gives you some of the sounds of trench life and the war beyond. The exhibit is absolutely topnotch.

I must confess unease when I visited the exhibit recently. I couldn't shake the feeling that the styrofoam trench represents a kind of narrowing of the perspective on the Great War. What we gain in the vicarious experience of horror, we lose in the area of real knowledge and critical judgement.

Horror, madness, suffering, pity are the memories that today remain potently alive of the Great War. The poet Siegfried Sassoon's agonized encounters with the pioneering psychiatrist William Rivers have been vividly re-created in Pat Barker's 1995 novel Regeneration. And our own Jack Hodgins has remembered the soldiers' plight in his recent Broken Ground.

It didn't take long before the political and military elites of the principal belligerent nations began to find ways of waging war more humanely, i.e. humanely for their troops, warfare that minimized the actual combat exposure of soldiers. I don't believe for a moment that our >betters= did this for humanitarian reasons. Ripped up bodies and battle dementia simply became very bad optics in the media age.

A very small start was made with the resumption of war in 1939. And it was somewhat successful. It was successful enough for a British newspaper to ask in 1941, where the new war poets were to be found? Typically the blame was put on the soldiers themselves. They were too soft, or not well educated enough, too socialist, and so on.

The real reason for the lack of war poetry, at least of the sort produced in the First World War, was that conditions of combat had changed. The experience was rather different, often less severe than it had been in 1914. I know that the phrase >less severe' sounds odd if you've seen films like Saving Private Ryan. Nothing was >less severe' about Omaha Beach on D-Day.

The difference lay not in the nastiness and delirium of the boom boom, but in the length of exposure to it. Our political and military masters clearly recognized, as a result of the first war, that it was necessary to shield the troops from very long periods of sustained stress and that they needed plenty of rest and recreation in order not to break down physically and emotionally.

This >humanizing= of the war for soldiers was accompanied by a new phenomenon. The total amount of pain and suffering was not diminished, it was simply shifted to civilians. And, incredible as it seems, the horrors increased exponentially. It was civilians now who endured a new kind of cold savagery. Civilians watched in horror as their cities went up in flames. It was civilians who were the victims of unspeakable atrocities and war crimes. And, worst of all, it was civilians who, shivering with fear, entered, in the words of David Rousset, "l'univers concentrationnaire," the unimaginable, individual holocausts from Auschwitz-Birkenau in the north to Jasenovac in the south. Meanwhile, for many of our soldiers, it was, as the song says, Athe best time of our lives.@

The change that began in the Second World War was consolidated during the American 9 to 5 commuter war in Vietnam. Atrocities against civilians were now routine. But even so, the Americans still took more casualties in Asia than they could stomach. And, as in the First World War, it was the optics of body bags and wheelchairs that turned the political tide.

The United States and the Europeans learned from this experience and are now very careful to keep their military commitments casualty free. In fact, the focus of warfare among the principal aggressor nations today, the Americans (with Canadian clients in tow), the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans has shifted and they practice a new kind of warfare.

The great powers now fight at long range and they only wage war when they know they can pulverize little countries into rubble and dust and when they know, even more importantly, that they won=t take very many casualties. As a result, the Chardonnay sippers in NATO can drop cluster bombs on the market place in Nis and the Russians can reduce Grozny to grit and blood. Only 168 Coalition soldiers died in the Gulf War, and many of them from friendly fire eagerly mowing down an army of untrained, peasant conscripts who were falling over each other trying to get away. And in Kosovo, NATO reported no casualties among their warriors.

Of course, there is always plenty of 'collateral damage' as a result of such aggressions, but the steely-eyed aviators and missile firing sailors who deliver death and destruction to mainly civilian populations no longer get close enough to see the blood and mire.

Poetry certainly has made something happen. In the Great War, it was the soldiers, like Siegfried Sassoon, who complained about the Home Front and the relative comforts of the stay-at-home flag-wavers, while the Tommys in the trenches suffered. Now it is the Tommys and Sallys who have all the comforts of home at their Club Med airbases and on their Love Boat aircraft carriers as they wage war on peasant armies and powerless civilians from a safe distance. I'm not sure any great poetry will ever come from them.

(John Xiros Cooper teaches the literature of the First World War, among other things, in the English Department at U. B. C.)

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