Vera Brittain Rebukes a V.C.; Wilfred Owen Arrives in Boulogne, not Dejected but Leaving Much Unsaid

Yesterday, a century back, Wilfred Owen wrote a card and a letter to his mother. He also wrote to Siegfried Sassoon–but since he wrote again today, I’ve left them both until now.

Sat., 31 August 1918

Goodbye—

dear Siegfried—

I’m much nearer to you here than in Scarborough, and am by so much happier.

I have been incoherent ever since I tried to say goodbye on the steps of Lancaster Gate. But everything is clear now: & I’m in hasty retreat towards the Front. Battle is easier here; and therefore you will stay and endure old men & women to the End; and wage the bitterer war and more hopeless.

When you write, please address to Mahim, Monkmoor Rd. Shrewsbury.

What more is there to say that you will not better understand unsaid.

Your W.E.O.

No doubt he will understand–or some of it, anyway. One imagines that Sassoon might also pretend not to understand some of what is unsaid as well– Amusingly, however, Owen wrote almost the exact same thing to his mother. Except, surely, the unspoken words were very different…

And what a difference a day makes, or doesn’t–Owen is now in France, and his beatific mood is maintained. Is he a working man–a writing man–with a purpose, or is he taking solace from a sense of martyrdom?

Sunday, 1 September 1918

A Depot, A.P.O. S.17

B.E.F., France

Dearest of all Friends,

Here is an address which will serve for a few days…

The sun is warm, the sky is clear, the waves are dancing fast & bright . . . But these are not Lines written in Dejection.

This is a reference to Shelley’s Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples… the romantic mood holds!

Serenity Shelley never dreamed of crowns me. Will it last when I shall have gone into Caverns & Abysmals such as he never reserved for his worst daemons?

Yesterday I went down to Folkestone Beach and into the sea, thinking to go through those stanzas & emotions of Shelley’s to the full. But I was too happy, or the Sun was too supreme. Moreover there issued from the sea distraction, in the shape. Shape I say, but lay no stress on that, of a Harrow boy, of superb intellect & refinement; intellect because he hates war more than Germans; refinement because of the way he spoke of my Going, and of the Sun, and of the Sea there; and the way he spoke of Everything. In fact, the way he spoke—

And now I am among the herds again, a Herdsman; and a Shepherd of sheep that do not know my voice.

Tell me how you are.

With great & painful firmness I have not said you goodbye from England. If you had said In the heart or brain you might have stabbed me, but you said only in the leg; so I was afraid.

Perhaps if I ‘write’ anything in dug-outs or in sleep a squad of riflemen will save you the trouble of buying a dagger.

Perhaps Owen is a skilled enough writer to pull of this strange combination of high Romantic feeling, sentimentalism, boy-watching, and comradely jocularity… or perhaps not. It’s an odd letter…

Finally, from Owen, there is a brief postcard to his mother, which again shows the similarities and differences in how he writes to the two people most dear to him:

…Impossible to feel depressed. All Auguries are of good fortune. How blessedly different from last year!

All love, W.E.O.^[1]

So Owen is going back to the front. But others went back many more times, and others, too, fled from uncertainties at home. Edward Brittain was one of these, and if his sister Vera was inclined to take her own solace in the sacrificial archetype, she is beginning to suspect that he has not gotten his due in death. She has come to believe, in fact, that some great act of valor by her brother was covered up, so that his surviving battalion commander, Col. C.E. Hudson, could profit by it instead. She is grieving, she is casting about, and she is very wrong: she missed a great deal about her brother’s life and now she is being kept in the dark about the true circumstances of his death. Today we would certainly condemn Hudson for, at the least, being paternalistic and condescending in hiding the alternate explanation for Brittain’s “valor”–that he exposed himself to enemy fire because he knew that he would otherwise face a Court Martial for having been sexually involved with a man under his command. But this was a terrible situation, and Hudson was surely doing what he thought was the kind and honorable thing, preserving Edward’s reputation and sparing his sister knowledge of his disgrace. And now he, wounded and awarded the Victoria Cross, is being accused of glory-hogging.

This, alas, is our doleful “month poem.”

TO A V.C.

Because your feet were stayed upon that road

Whereon the others swiftly came and passed,

Because the harvest you and they had sowed

You only reaped at last.

 

Tis not your valour’s meed alone you bear

Who stand the object of a nation’s pride,

For on that humble Cross you live to wear

Your friends were crucified.

 

They shared with you the conquest over fear,

Sublime self-disregard, decision’s power,

But Death, relentless, left you lonely here

In recognition’s hour.

 

Their sign is yours to carry to the end;

The lost reward of gallant hearts as true

As yours they called their leader and their friend

Is worn for them by you.