Poet
18th of March 1893
1 - Oswestry & Birkenhead
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born in Shropshire on the 18th of March 1893. Elegant and spacious, overlooking a vast garden, Plas Wilmot was the country house of Owen's maternal grandfather, Edward Shaw, and was also his parents’ home.
Energetic and lively, Tom Owen, his father, worked on the railways. His short trip to India, left him with a nostalgia for the sea and the great outdoors. Descended from the local bourgeoisie, his wife Susan Shaw, an ardent Christian extremely attentive to respectability, was rapidly to nourish her hopes of social success – or revenge – on the eldest of her four children.
When Edward Shaw died in 1897, his family followed in his decline. All the old man left to his heirs were debts, and Plas Wilmot needed to be sold in all haste. This marked the end of the golden age in the Owen family history. After the Garden of Eden, a new era arose, marked by material uncertainty and the will to maintain an apparent social status and position to the eyes of the outside world. Affluence was replaced by a more frugal lifestyle. Mary was born in 1895 and Harold in 1897 ,during the family's residence in Shrewsbury. Wilfred was four years old when the family moved to Birkenhead, on the banks of the Mersey, opposite Liverpool, where Tom was offered a job with a better salary. The undulating and verdant Shropshire countryside was replaced by an industrial landscape where the harbour offered new oceanic prospects. The Owens rented a series of modest houses but maintained – albeit with difficulty – a relatively middle-class lifestyle; considering anything less to be demeaning. Their youngest child, Colin, was born in 1900.
They stayed in Birkenhead until the winter of 1906. Despite their financial difficulties, the Owens continued to travel. Thanks to his position on the railways, Tom provided free tickets to Ireland, London or Reading. An enchanted stay in Broxton, in the Cheshire hills, was to make such an impression on Wilfred that, many years later, he chose to begin his poetic career there.
2 - Shrewsbury
Late 1906, Tom Owen became assistant station master in Shrewsbury. For Wilfred, this meant the return to his native Shropshire, in the medieval town surrounded by the Severn, where the streets were often bathed in Welsh conversation, as if echoing the history of a shifting border.
The Owens first chose Cleveland Place, close to the ancient Norman abbey, before moving, in 1910, to Mahim, Monkmoor Road, in a discrete semi-detached house of late Victorian style. Wilfred was educated at the nearby Technical School where he developed an avid appetite for study. Languages and British literature were among his favourite subjects. Shakespeare and the Romantics, Keats in particular, aroused his enthusiasm. It was during this period that Owen wrote the first poems he was to keep: To Poesy and Written in a Wood – plays of little originality, since essentially inspired by Keats – dated September 1910.
«A thousand suppliants stand around thy throne,
Stricken with love for thee, O Poesy.»
But it was essentially a time of adventure, of naive faith and mothering. Excursions were mostly influenced by Tom. By foot, train or bicycle, occasionally on horseback or by boat, all or part of the Owen family travelled throughout the area, the country and even as far as Brittany. Wilfred's attention was particularly drawn by the Roman town of Uriconium, close to Shrewsbury. It was an opportunity, shovel in hand, to put his natural curiosity as a novice archaeologist into practice, and via his imagination, to travel through time. In 1913, he wrote To Uriconium, an Ode – in memory of his excavations.
«It lieth low near merry England's heart
Like a long-buried sin; and Englishmen
Forget that in its death their sires had part.»
The Owens were very religious. Susan kept a watchful eye on the subject and Tom followed willingly. They scarcely smoked or drank. Being of Evangelical allegiance, a small branch of the closest Anglicanism to Protestantism, the family devoted a great deal of its time to church attendance and Bible reading, which were to have a long-lasting influence on the future poet’s imagery and vocabulary.
Furthermore, the relationship between Susan Owen and her eldest son was soon to develop into almost embarrassing exclusivity. Convinced that she was in poor health, Susan Owen was compelled to keep Wilfred by her side, almost transforming him into her personal escort. Neither Mary nor Colin, nor Harold in particular, were to benefit from such a status. Between Susan and her son, began correspondence that was only to end upon Wilfred’s death. Meanwhile, conscious of the privilege he had been granted, the teenager developed a serious, occasionally pedantic, intellect, assuming birthrights over his brothers which, more often than not, were neither justified nor justifiable.
Wilfred completed his studies at Shrewsbury Technical School. He began his career in primary education, a logical calling since he was excellent with children. However, a short experience as a teacher in Wyle Cop primary school convinced Owen that his future was elsewhere.
He was now eighteen. Family finances forced him to be realistic: in order to be accepted at London University, he was required to pass an entrance examination and, above all, to obtain a grant. Meanwhile, there was no time for idleness. In October 1911, Wilfred finally left Shrewsbury to head for Dunsden, near Reading. For very first time, he was alone. It was the beginning of independence… or so he thought.
3 - Dunsden
A rural village close to Reading, scattered between hamlets and isolated farms, Dunsden barely counted six hundred souls. Reverend Herbert Wignan was the highly respected village priest and was a reserved man, almost verging on dull. Close to Catholicism in the early days, he gradually adopted a stricter Evangelism. Therefore, this rather cold intellectual confidently welcomed within his presbytery a new layman as assistant, whose family shared his own convictions. In return for his numerous services, Wilfred was offered free lodgings and meals, together with the priest’s tuition to prepare his university admittance examination.
However, he was very soon to become disillusioned. Absorbed in his theological thoughts and haunted by the necessity for religious conversion, Wigan overlooked his promise. Everyday duties and parish tasks were soon to occupy the young assistant on a full-time basis. His main responsibility was in dealing with the village children: he gave music lessons, Bible readings and religious study, regular educational meetings and catechism, and in the evening attended extremely formal and extremely tiresome dinners in the presbytery. He also visited parishioners, in particular the poor. Little time was left for study, and even less for writing.
Very soon, the young man was torn. Confronted with the villagers’ illiteracy, illness, and misery, but also with the indifference of the self-righteous and the conservatism of the rich, all be they fervent Christians, Wilfred began to question his faith. Moreover, the everyday stubborn proselytism, intellectual thanklessness and simplistic spirituality left him unsatisfied.
Existential distress emerged. Brother Owen began to doubt. Whereas social life was, above all, increasingly governed by appearance, his everyday life was spent in the company of people who were more educated and devoted than he was, together with extremely unfortunate people to whom he could offer no more than his sympathy and pity.
Only a few rare friendships with his young pupils and his improved facility to put his worries into verse helped him to endure this asymmetrical existence. Although Keats continued to inspire his writing, his intimate agony prevailed over romantic imagery. His verses became more personal.
«O World of many worlds, O life of lives,
What centre hast thou? Where am I?»
At the same time, together with his cousin Leslie Gunston, he organised writing competitions on given topics. In such a context, the discovery of the avant-garde poet Harold Monro (1879-1932) – a sort of prophet, simultaneously vitalist and decadent – further eroded the foundations of his already fragile faith.
The situation had to change. A trivial bicycle fall was to trigger the first crisis. Victim of an unexpected fainting spell, Wilfred suffered from vertigo, which was just as physical as it was existential. Confrontation with Reverend Wigan was inevitable. It took place in December 1912. No one ever discovered precisely what was said at Dunsden presbytery on that Christmas Eve. However, things became strikingly clear. Wilfred wrote to his mother, «Murder had to be committed, and I have killed my false beliefs». Brother Owen had chosen apostasy. Sick and depressed, he left the parish in February 1913, unsure of his future – but certain of his vocation.
». In August 1914, Great-Britain was yet to discover national military service, and the insular campaigns in Bordeaux in favour of voluntary enlistment had little influence on His Royal Highness’s expatriates. In France, a country of conscription, no one questioned their fate. Furthermore, the fortune of British privates («All those Tommy Atkins, poor lads») inspired in Wilfred but condescending pity. According to him, the guns would probably provide «some useful cleaning». Was it not better to be «a living poet than a dead soldier »? After all, the encounter he had just made was infinitely more appealing.
4 - Bordeaux
Back in Shrewsbury, Wilfred discovered a tense family situation. At the age of fifteen, his brother Harold had been asked to leave the family home to find a job – despite his wish to study art. Wilfred had just passed the entrance examination at Reading University but had not succeeded in obtaining the necessary grant. He had missed his chance, and he knew it.
Consequently, mid-September 1913, he sailed for Bordeaux, in France, where he was offered a position as English teacher at the Berlitz School of Languages. The mild climate was to help him improve his health. He intended to take advantage of his stay to improve his French and, finally, to seriously devote time to writing.
Despite the low pay, the work was exhausting. The young teacher taught up to ten hours a day, six days a week, respecting the principle of private tuition. In Bordeaux, he soon moved to number 95, rue Porte-Dijeaux, and often paid visits to his local neighbours at the Christian Union who, in the early days, provided him with amusement and company.
He liked Bordeaux. Despite the exhausting quantity of work, Wilfred finally enjoyed a form of independence. Furthermore, among the high society who came to the school, Wilfred met Mr and Mrs Léger. Mrs Léger, a decorator and a very liberated woman, rapidly offered him a new position. She and her husband were looking for a private tutor for their daughter, Nénette. Tired of being exploited at the Berlitz School, Wilfred accepted. On the 31st of July 1914, he headed for Bagnères-de-Bigorre and the handsome property of Castel Lorenzo where the family stayed during the summer.
Whereas rumours of war grew in Europe, the young man’s thoughts were elsewhere. He delighted in his new-found freedom. He wrote, «the feeling of being obliged to no one is as sweet as it is new». He observed the conflict at a distance. «I feel my own life all the more precious and more dear in the presence of this deflowering Europe
Laurent Tailhade (1854-1919) was sixty at the time, and was a friend of the Légers. He had met with Verlaine. His poetic career was behind him but he still lived in the aura of declining decadentism. His turbulent past, marked by anarchist sympathies and a certain taste for provocation, had transformed him into a somewhat declining and tired Mephisto. Their mutual admiration was instantaneous. The old aesthete was charmed by the young Englishman's ardour. Wilfred was impressed by his elder's position as an established and renowned poet. Thanks to Tailhade’s intervention, he discovered the fading flowers of Symbolism, the poetics of world-weariness, nostalgia and exquisite pain. To a greater extent than with Monro, he discovered the power of certain versification techniques, among them assonance, alliteration and internal rime. The first examples of the British pararhyme that he was later to employ felicitously – applying it to a variety of different topics – can be found in the plays that he pondered at the time, traces of which can still be read in manuscripts kept in Bordeaux.
In October 1914, Mrs Léger left for Canada on a business trip. Wilfred was then faced with finding new employers and new pupils, as well as a new apartment, appropriate for receiving his clients, who were often from the high society. Consequently, he moved to number 13, rue Desfourniel in Bordeaux.
Meanwhile, the war, which had initially been announced as short, continued to spread. Wilfred progressively came to reconsider his position. No social pressure urged him to react. When he visited the town hospital where casualties were nursed, his sole reaction was curiosity close to voyeurism. The compassionate poet was not yet born. When he finally decided to take up arms, he was ready to defend civilisation, and its main stake that he revered so: language.
In December 1914, he obtained a position as private tutor for the De La Touche family in Mérignac. However, his inner conviction towards voluntary service had gained ground.
«I don't want to wear khaki; nor yet to save my honour before inquisitive grandchildren fifty years hence. But I now do most intensively want to fight».
He returned to England for the first time in May 1915, on a business trip on behalf of a Bordeaux perfumer. When he returned to France, he toyed with the rather absurd idea of joining the Italian cavalry «for practical and aesthetical reasons». However, in September 1915, his decision was final. Wilfred crossed the Channel and signed his enlistment as officer cadet in the 28th battalion of the London Regiment, better known as the Artist’s Rifles. Endorsed as training, his stay abroad had opened the doors of this prestigious military unit. Since the British army had started to suffer from its lack of officers, the hour had struck for temporary gentlemen. Wilfred was one of them.
He was twenty-two years old. To date, he had only written twenty or so post-romantic poems, among which very few were known beyond the family circle or among close friends. His writing was yet to mature. However, he had no choice but to wait, since military life was beginning, along with its procession of constraints.
He was suffering from post-traumatic shock. The doctors’ diagnosis was formal: neurasthenia. Declared unfit for military service, he was repatriated to Britain and he arrived at the military hospital in Craiglockhart on the 26th of June 1917. His stay there was to change his life as much as his experience of combat had.
5 - War, from London to Bois de Savy
Duke's Road, in the very heart of Bloomsbury, housed the Artist’s Rifles’ headquarters. It was in this modest suburb of London, much appreciated by poets and other literary friends that Harold Monro had set up his Poetry Bookshop. Wilfred, delighted by such a vicinity, paid regular visits to the shop, met the owner and even dared to show him some of his texts. However, his literary activities were, above all, governed by the rhythm of his military lessons and exercises.
After having sent an entire territorial battalion out to the front, the Artist’s Rifles had become an instruction unit for officers. Recruitment was relatively selective. Wilfred experienced great difficulty in entering the strict class system of post-Victorian Britain, for many cadets came from rich and prominent families. In addition, his relatively small size (5 feet 5 inches) did not make matters easier. However, he overcame such obstacles and second lieutenant Wilfred Owen entered the Manchester Regiment on the 4th of June 1916. Having completed his training on the 29th of December, he sailed from Folkestone to return to France, from where he had left fifteen months earlier.
On the 6th of January 1917, Wilfred joined his unit in the Somme, in the vicinity of Beaumont-Hamel. After the costly allied offensive that had marred the region between July and November 1916, the 2nd regular battalion of the Manchester Regiment – sorely afflicted – was seeking to reinforce its ranks. Wilfred was immediately given the command of the A Company's 3rd platoon. He almost immediately experienced the horrors of trench warfare, further worsened by an exceptionally harsh winter. It was not a time for poetry, but for suffering.
On the 12th of January 1917, together with his men, he found himself in a half-swamped shelter in no man’s land. Pinned under the earth for almost two days, whilst enduring violent bombing, the detachment managed to maintain his position. Injured by a piece of shrapnel, a sentry had lost his sight. A year later, Wilfred was to write this verse in The Sentry.
«Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout
'I see your lights!' - But ours had long gone out.»
A few days later, the platoon was forced to remain long hours, lying in the snow and in the bitter cold, virtually uncovered and protected from the enemy only by a gentle undulation in the terrain. The hallucinated memory of this event was to lay the foundations of Exposure, one of the great poems of maturity.
«Ours brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us...
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent...»
In the meantime, apart from abundant correspondence with his mother, Wilfred was only able to write during his short rest periods. Far from the everyday reality of the front, Wilfred and his cousin Leslie continued their usual poetic wits, on rather classical, if not hackneyed, topics.
During the night of the 15th of March, in the razed village of Quesnoy-en-Santerre, Wilfred fell from a great height to the bottom of a cave. Succoured a few hours later, he was evacuated behind the front, where the doctor diagnosed cerebral commotion. Taking advantage of his temporary convalescence, he wrote With an Identity Disc for his brother Colin, a poem that was later to appear on a small monument erected by the Western Front Association in Ors, on the banks of the Sambre-Oise canal.
In April, hardly had second lieutenant Owen recovered, when he participated in a number of bloody attacks in the area of Saint-Quentin, close to the Hindenburg line. The battalion met with difficulty at the entrance to the village of Fayet, and was virtually ensnared against Savy wood. On the 14th of April, while he was trying to shelter behind a railway embankment, Wilfred was surprised by a blast from a nearby explosion and was thrown several metres. The remains of a friend killed a few days earlier, lieutenant Gaukroger, were strewn across the battlefield.
Already considerably shattered, the second lieutenant was close to nervous breakdown. On the 1st of May 1917, after a series of troop inspections, his superiors noticed «shivering and shuddering, abnormal behaviour and a confused memory».
6 - Craiglockhart, Scarborough & Ripon
Situated in the suburbs of Edinburgh, Craiglockhart hospital was an old hydropathic establishment, where most of the patients were officers suffering from post-traumatic shock, also known as shell shock. The mankind that haunted the halls and rooms of the sombre building symbolised a life made of nightmares, phobias and debilitating symptoms among which stammering, nervous twitches, muteness, partial paralysis and insensibility. In his correspondence, Wilfred always remained reserved, or even evasive on the subject of his illness; for the wounds hidden away in Craiglockhart were far from glorious.
He was treated by Doctor Brock, an adept of a treatment method based on exercise and work. According to Brock, it was necessary to re-establish contact between the patient and his own world, by relying on his personal interests. He therefore urged Wilfred to write, but also to revitalise his past pursuits such as walking and botanics. The young officer was rapidly entrusted with the hospital journal, The Hydra, for which he wrote editorials, supervised layout and oversaw printing.
However, mid-August, Craiglockhart welcomed a personality who was rapidly to play a decisive role in Wilfred’s life: Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967). The man, who had his luggage delivered to the hospital reception hall, already had a firmly established reputation. As a poet, he had published a few satirical books in which he depicted with harsh words the absurd and pitiless world of trench warfare. Lieutenant in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, he had demonstrated almost suicidal courage during combat in France, before defiantly throwing his Military Cross into the Mersey. He was a public figure, and had written a thunderous denunciation on British war objectives, which had been read in Parliament. In sort, rich, famous and untouchable, Sassoon intensely embarrassed the military establishment and his relegation to Craiglockhart for nervous breakdown was more of a political than a medical decision.
Wilfred immediately did all in his power to meet with his elder. Sassoon was initially rather irritated, very nearly condescending; however, he gradually developed an interest in the young man who was less cultivated than himself, but he had an abundant talent impossible to slight. Certain advice on verse form and title choice beguiled the novice and encouraged him to rewrite his texts, sometimes imitating – with a disciple’s devotion – the poet he now considered to be his master. First and foremost, Sassoon convinced Owen at long last to draw on his personal war experience to inspire his texts.
The result was immediate and spectacular. Wilfred not only now knew the path he was to follow, he had also discovered the power of speech. A first text was soon to be published in The Hydra. Nevertheless, although Song of Songs revealed an indisputable faculty for versification technique, his inspiration remained conventional. The best was yet to come.
For, in Craiglockhart, Wilfred experienced a period of intense creativity, during which the beginnings of many of his major poems were written. The young officer freely expressed his abhorrence for war and his compassion for mankind, wounded, forsaken as far as humanity itself - using innovative language, exploring the rich heritage of English poetry, and endeavouring to transcend it. Moreover, confirming Dr. Brock’s diagnosis, the catharsis provoked by Wilfred's writing was contributing to improving his health: his nervousness was diminishing. In October 1917, he met another poet and officer, Robert Graves (1895-1985) expressed great respect for Wilfred's work.
Late October, Wilfred was declared cured and left Craiglockhart to spend a few days furlough in London. Robert Ross, a friend of Sassoon, introduced him to various brilliant literary authorities, among whom Herbert George Wells, Arnold Bennett and Osbert Sitwell – writers the young poet could never have dreamed of meeting a few months earlier.
Appointed chief of the officers’ mess in Scarborough, Wilfred moved to the sumptuous Clarence Hotel, situated on the cliff tops overlooking the sea. Most of his free time was spent writing. In particular, he began his most famous poem, Strange Meeting, and amended his oldest plays, including Hospital Barge and The Show. When invited to Robert Graves’ wedding in January 1918, the future author of I, Claudius introduced him to his guests as «Mister Owen, poet», surprising a delighted Wilfred. Miners was then published in the weekly, The Nation.
In March 1918, second lieutenant Owen was transferred to the Ripon depot. In order to take full advantage of his rare periods of leisure, he rented a room in a quiet cottage in Borrage Lane. He wrote, among others, Futility and The Send-Off. His inspiration was unfaltering.
«So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent.»
However, he knew very well that this merry interlude would inevitably come to an end. In France, the front was threatened by the German spring offensive. Paris was at risk. As he read the newspapers, Wilfred realised that the battlefields where he had formerly fought were now in German hands.
By some strange irony of fate, at the same time, his literary career was burgeoning. Osbert and Edith Sitwell asked him to provide a few poems for Wheels, their annual 1918 anthology. Futility and Hospital Barge were published in The Nation. Wilfred could even finally consider publishing a book. With the aim to do so, he jotted down the draft of a preface and a summary.
However, on the 10th of August 1918, the medical commission declared him fit for armed service. He returned to France on the 31st, ready to join his unit.
«I came out again to help those boys; directly, by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader.»
(4th October 1918).
7 - Back to arms
After a short stay in the base camp of Étaples, where he hardly found time to write Smile, Smile, Smile and to amend The Sentry, Wilfred joined the Manchesters in Corbie, close to Amiens, on the 13th of September 1918. The German offensive had been stopped in Villers-Bretonneux and Château-Thierry: it was Allies’ turn to attack. Trench warfare ended with the reconquering of lost territories and the pursuit of the enemy. Armies needed to rework their skills in forward manoeuvres and advances. Losses were heavy.
As soon as he arrived, Wilfred was assigned to the D company as grenadier officer. When they moved forward, the 4th British Army crossed the same battlefields as those on which the 2nd Manchesters had fought in April 1917. But this time, Wilfred was perfectly capable of challenging his most painful memories. His officer mates nicknamed him The Ghost, for many of them thought he was dead. None of them knew that he wrote. For Wilfred, many new faces appeared. Among others, a colourful character, major Marshall, who was both admired and feared, and nicknamed by Wilfred «the terrible ten-wound major».
The Hindenburg line had been abandoned but the reserve positions were still in German hands. Consequently, the Manchesters were to join the attack of the Beaurevoir-Fonsomme line. On the 1st of October 1918, Joncourt fell without major difficulty, but the line itself, situated to the east of the village, resisted relentlessly. Leading the platoon, second lieutenant Owen attacked a submachine gun nest and, alone, took control of the gun turning it against the enemy, hence maintaining his position. Thanks to this achievement, the attack was a success.
Constantly attentive to his men, Wilfred made sure to bring them back to the lines himself as soon as dusk fell. He now commanded the entire company, for all of the other officers had been killed or injured.
On the same day, he was recommended for the Military Cross, for «conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty". He was later to write to his mother, «I can find no other word to describe my experiences but the word extreme. (…) It passed the limits of my Abhorrence. I lost all my earthly faculties and I fought like an angel».
On the 3rd of October, the platoon was relieved. It took up quarters in Hancourt, then in Saint-Souplet, to the south of Le Cateau. Orders were given throughout the ranks to cease rumours of forthcoming peace. Peace talk must cease. For the Manchesters now had a new objective: the Sambre-Oise canal, to the east of the small village of Ors, in the vicinity of Le Cateau-Cambrésis.
8 - Ors
On the 14th of October, Wilfred handed the company command over to a less experienced lieutenant but with a superior grade; whereas reinforcements were converging for the final offensive, Wilfred's promotion was long overdue. Together with the 96th brigade of the 32nd division, the Manchesters were stationed at Bois-l’Evêque, to the west of the village of Ors, on the left bank of the Sambre-Oise canal, which needed to be crossed.
Promoted to Colonel, and transferred as chief of corps to the neighbouring battalion, the 16th Lancashire Fusiliers, the former Major Marshall was entrusted with the delicate task of determining the assault zone. He rapidly came to an irrevocable conclusion: the planned operation was «virtually impossible». Indeed, the brigade was required to move forward on exposed ground, reach the barely 1m20 high canal embankment, clamber over it to assemble and throw 12-metre-long bridges, one per battalion. The entire attack was to take place under fierce gunfire by the enemy, securely entrenched on the right bank around the La Motte farm, organised in redoubt behind the front line.
Marshall’s warning was disregarded by the high command. Similarly to the darkest hours of the Somme battle, the Colonel was told that any opposition would have previously been crushed by artillery and that the crossing would result in minimal losses. The combatant bowed to his authority's wishes; however his tangible lucidity generated unease among the troops: the bridge crossing was sure to be a cruel affair. Nonetheless, the exhausted troops were also convinced that they had never been in such close reach of an end to the conflict.
In the meantime, Wilfred was stationed with his company staff at the Maison forestière, whose tiny cellar was a safe shelter. On the 31st of October, he wrote his last letter to his mother, marked with a benevolent, however forced, optimism, «There is no danger down here - or if any, it will be well over before you read those lines».
On the 2nd and 3rd of November, whereas both battalions chosen for the crossing – the 2nd Manchester and the 16th Lancashire Fusiliers – were preparing to attack, to the north of the assault zone, the brigade's third unit, the 15th Lancashire Fusiliers, was vainly struggling to free the Happegarbes crest. Should anyone have dared to doubt, the enemy was not yet prepared to give up. On the contrary, it desperately strove to maintain its position.
Zero hour was fixed for the 4th of November 1918, 5.45am. Artillery was already thundering. From Bois-l’Evêque, the 2nd Manchesters reached the embankment under cover of darkness, smoke and fog. Immediately, the combat engineers threw their cork floats onto the water and started to build the bridge. However, the fog was clearing. Opposing machine guns and mortars joined in the dance, soon to be followed by shrapnel and gas. Rapidly decimated, the Royal Engineers were becoming thin on the ground. Short of solutions and manpower, their commander Major Waters, plunged into the canal to finish the work himself. Thirty minutes went by. In the meantime, perched on a makeshift raft, a young officer, lieutenant Kirk, emptied magazine after magazine of his Lewis machine gun to protect the manoeuvre. It was to cost him his life. A few men crossed. The bridge was destroyed.
Grouped to the left of the Manchesters, the 16th Lancashire Fusiliers experienced the same difficulties. Their bridge never reached the opposite bank. The rafts sank one after another. Colonel Marshall's eleventh wound was to be his last: he was killed outright on the towpath.
However, the division was not yet totally lost. The sacrifice of both the 2nd Manchesters and the 16th Lancashire Fusiliers had mobilised the German troops’ entire energy and attention. In Ors, the 1st Dorsets took advantage of the situation and crossed the canal to the south of the village. The German defence was attacked from the rear. At 8.30am, survivors from the attacking battalions also crossed the canal from the south, while the 15th Lancashire Fusiliers, having succeeded in clearing the Happegarbes crest, followed the canal northwards to finally cross at Landrecies.
The battle was over.
By now, second lieutenant Owen was already dead. On the bank, encouraging his men, or trying to cross the canal waters.
He was twenty-five years old, had published four poems and had written a hundred other unpublished texts half of which had been produced between 1916 and 1918.
On the following day, the 5th of November, the London Gazette announced Wilfred Edward Salter Owen’s promotion to lieutenant, with immediate effect from the 4th of December 1917.
On the 8th of November, lieutenant Owen was granted with the Military Cross for his exemplary conduct on the Beaurevoir-Fonsomme line.
On the same day, he was buried with his mates and Colonel Marshall in the small square reserved for British military graves in the village of Ors' communal cemetery.
War ended three days later.
In Shrewsbury, on the 11th of November, as the bells rang to celebrate the Armistice, the telegram the Owens had feared for so long finally arrived.
9 - Afterwards
Apart from his family and his close circle of literary friends, Wilfred’s death went unnoticed as for many like him. Late 1918, the loss was neither measured nor measurable.
On her son’s gravestone, Susan had two verses of The End engraved. But in truncating the text, particularly by removing the final question mark, she transformed its desperate meaning into a message of hope.
«Shall life renew these bodies? Of a truth
All death will he annul, all tears assuage?»
This minor, possibly unintentional, treachery did not prevent her from respecting Wilfred’s will: to burn a number of his personal documents without reading them. However, Susan Owen cherished his letters, six hundred of which still exist today.
His literary reputation emerged gradually. As early as 1919, Osbert and Edith Sitwell dedicated their annual anthology to Wilfred. It included seven of his poems. This was but the beginning. The following year, assisted by Edith Sitwell, Siegfried Sassoon published Owen's first complete poetry book for which Sassoon wrote the preface. However, the real breakthrough was in 1931, when another poet and officer, Edmund Blunden, published his works, together with an insightful study.
Little by little, Wilfred Owen occupied an increasingly clear position within the English poetry panorama. Numerous influent critics, among them C. Day Lewis, saw in him the link between the Georgian Poets and post-war modernist movements. Even W. B. Yeats’ discordant voice was insufficient to temper the general wave of recognition.
In 1967, after drafting his three-volume memoirs, «Journey from Obscurity» (1963-1965) – in which he tended to portray his elder brother in an unflattering manner – Harold Owen granted John Bell permission to publish the letters. Unfortunately, as co-editor, he proceeded to a number of revisions, irretrievably cutting and censoring certain texts, leaving Wilfred’s biography, to this very day, with inestimable empty spaces.
Biographers had no choice but to content themselves. Jon Stallworthy (Wilfred Owen, 1974) led the way, followed by various other writers, among them Helen McPhail (Wilfred Owen, Poet and Soldier, 1993) and, in particular, Dominic Hibberd, whose third book on Wilfred, Wilfred Owen, A New Biography (2002) is nowadays considered to be a reference.
The definitive edition of his poems and fragments was published in 1983, under Jon Stallworthy’s direction.
Even so, the finest homage ever was, without a doubt, paid by the great composer, Benjamin Britten (1913-1976). In his War Requiem (1962), he combined the solemnity of the mass for the dead with some of Wilfred’s finest poems, allowing them, at one fell swoop, to acquire greater renown.
Later, in the 90s, the poet – fallen too soon – finally escaped from thematic anthologies and academic books thanks to a few pocket editions dedicated to his only works. The message was at last perfectly clear: the great poet had definitively superseded the simple witness of hard times.
Any complex character brings his share of claimants. Wilfred Owen’s authenticity is also measurable by the number of cliques claiming responsibility for it, either from a human or political, as well as military, social, or – naturally – literary point of view. For the poet is definitely beyond cliché.
It is therefore not surprising to suddenly discover him, like a recurrent figure, in the work of current writers among whom Pat Barker (Regeneration, 1991; picture by Gillies McKinnon, 1997) or, in the French repertoire, Xavier Hanotte.
After having drafted confidential translations of some of Owen’s texts, the latter published in 2001 Et chaque lent crepuscule (And each lingering crepuscule), the first book of poems and letters adapted into French and readily available in bookstores.
Meanwhile, in Ors, a few willing volunteers are working together to transform the Maison forestière, the canal banks and the communal cemetery into places of art and heritage.
Wilfred Owen has been dead for over eighty years. However, if truth be told, his story has barely commenced here in France, the country where he loved to live and where he rests.
Poetry engenders miracles.
