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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Artists and War Art

Introduction, general overviews.

Ancient Greek and Roman War Art
War Art in the Middle Ages
Eighteenth-Century Revolutionary Wars and Art
Nineteenth-Century War Art
Artists and World War I
Artists and World War II
Artists of the Cold and Nuclear Wars
The Korean and Vietnam Wars through Art
War Art in the Late 20th and 21st Centuries

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Artists and War Art by Margaret George , Victoria Young LAST REVIEWED: 29 July 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 29 July 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791279-0195

A war artist is one who captures the subject of war in some type of artistic form. Since the beginning of time, artists have recorded scenes of war as a visual record of a culture’s existence and tribulations. Images of battles, ship portraits, leaders, and soldiers made up the bulk of war images until the late 19th century. The creators of the majority of these works are unknown, but when the entire world first went to war in 1914, nations hired official war artists to depict the action, including warplanes, tanks, and other newly developed technologies, among other aspects, as subject matter. These artists were mostly men, who were on the front lines sketching, painting, and photographing the action, collecting the visuals of war that they might then collate into an official work for a nation. As the 20th century progressed into our current era, images became immediately accessible on television and film, in news reports, and in live streams, as reporters embedded themselves with soldiers. Official war artists still exist in several nations, as do official collections of artwork created by them. We also have vibrant unofficial images of war produced by soldiers and prisoners for their own purposes, or by people protesting war itself. In compiling this bibliography, we sought to convey the breadth of war art mainly in 2-D media in chronology, type, artistic style, and maker, including voices of artists whenever possible. We also considered how artists from differing sides in battle impact each other’s artistic production. Being an artist who depicts war is a challenge. How do you convey honor and brutality, tradition and modernity, glory and defeat? How do you watch devastation around you and provide witness as you record the intensity and sadness of death? Combat artists of a particular country create art that reveals their experience of war. Is it personal? Or should it only be a documentary? The complexities found in creating the art of war are many, yet without these works there are centuries of battle we would not understand from social, political, or technological viewpoints.

Anyone with an interest in the importance of art made during wartime should begin with the excellent chronological survey Brandon 2007 . Rabb 2011 focuses on master artists and their depictions of war since ancient times. Perlmutter 1999 provides a thematic overview of the topic, focusing on the visual and its significance to the historical record. Bourke’s edited volume provides insights into the breadth of artistic production influenced by war over the last two hundred years. Firsthand accounts by artists are important. In Chenoweth 2002 the author shares his tale of time in Korea and Vietnam while also uncovering remembrances from other artists serving there. But art does not only record war, it also is used to protest against it, as Bruckner, et al. 1984 reveals. Additionally, art can be found in surprising places of warfare; Helphand 2006 , for example, reveals the importance of garden design as a way to survive terror and trauma in the trenches, Jewish ghettos, and Japanese internment camps. Saunders 2003 is an intriguing material culture study about art produced from things left behind during war, such as shells, wood, and bone. Typically, the majority of scholarship about artists and war feature men as the preeminent makers of it, but several scholars are working to uncover the story of women as war artists, as seen in Calvin and Deacon 2011 and Deacon and Calvin 2014 .

Bourke, Joanna, ed. War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict . London: Reaktion Books, 2017.

A survey of the connections between art and war over the last two centuries. Essays by leading scholars in the field cover general areas of history, genre, artists, and contexts, with focuses on specific artists, war and film, children and art, war-themed video games, and the apocalypse, among others. A variety of artistic media are shared in the essays, as well as in the book’s lavish illustrations.

Brandon, Laura. Art and War . New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007.

A chronologically ordered, encyclopedic account that starts with the Standard of Ur (2600–2400 BCE ) and works through to the first decade of the 21st century. Themes of war memory, gender, and art type emerge in the skillful prose. The author, a curator of war art at the Canadian War Museum from 1992 to 2015, also provides an extensive bibliography. This book is the first stop for research on artists and war.

Bruckner, D. J. R., Seymour Chwast, and Steven Heller. Art against War: 400 Years of Protest in Art . New York: Abbeville Press, 1984.

This work reveals how artists have criticized war over the past 400 years. The authors gear this text toward the generalist in short but useful text, surrounded by 183 illustrations, including 30 in color, of paintings, drawings, posters, collages, film stills, and sculpture. Various themes emerge, including antiwar art, antimilitarism art, and personal art. Artworks come from Russia, Europe, the United States, and Japan.

Calvin, Paula E., and Deborah A. Deacon. American Women Artists in Wartime, 1776–2010 . Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011.

This work is among the first to consider the impact of women on the art of war in America since the Revolution. Women were artists, photographers, and needle workers, and they captured not only the actuality of war, but also their personal responses to it. Their work also broadened the subject matter portrayed, often moving beyond the battlefield.

Chenoweth, H. Avery. Art of War: Eyewitness U.S. Combat Art from the Revolution through the 20th Century . Fairfax, VA: Michael Friedman, 2002.

Written by a US Marine and war artist in Korea and Vietnam, this work presents only war art completed by artists who witnessed the scene he or she depicted. Focused on wars in the United States since the Revolution, these works reveal the reality of war in highly impactful paintings that show the breadth of realism as it informs art.

Deacon, Deborah A., and Paula E. Calvin. War Imagery in Women’s Textiles: An International Study of Weaving, Knitting, Sewing, Quilting, Rug Making and Other Fabric Arts . Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014.

Textiles, traditionally an art form of women, reveal the impact of war dating back to the Middle Ages and the Bayeux Tapestry. This book stems from “Stitches of War,” a 2003 exhibition at Arizona State University, and features artists from Europe, the United States, and Canada. An extensive bibliography, notes, and glossary add to the usefulness of this work in shedding light on a much understudied topic.

Helphand, Kenneth I. Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime . San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2006.

A winner of several major awards, landscape architect Helphand’s book documents how gardens served practical and therapeutic roles during wartime in the 20th century, including those built by soldiers in the trenches during WWI, gardens of stone created by Japanese Americans in internment camps during WWII, and gardens in the WWII ghettos. The author relies heavily on firsthand accounts from the individuals who created these landscapes as well as the users who sustained them.

Perlmutter, David D. Visions of War: Picturing Warfare from the Stone Age to the Cyber Age . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Written by a mass communications professor who was interested in the power of the visual to record and reveal war. Thematically organized across all of time in the Western world, with topics including origins, commanders, comrades, enemies, horrors, war in everyday life, and futures of war.

Rabb, Theodore K. The Artist and the Warrior: Military History through the Eyes of the Masters . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

Art historian Rabb considers the relationship between the history of art and the history of warfare from Assyria to modern film. Topics include the ancient world; Rome and the Middle Ages, featuring the Bayeux tapestry; feudal Japan; the Renaissance; war as decoration; David versus Goya; modern times; and the role of film in depicting war. Engagingly written, with 100 color plates.

Saunders, Nicholas. Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War . Oxford: Berg, 2003.

Material culture centers this insightful discussion of objects made from the waste of war by soldiers, prisoners of war, and civilians. The author considers materials used and how this artwork fits into already defined art movements through the lenses of anthropology and material culture. Saunders work reveals that from 1800 up to the present day, trench art sustains a war artist in ways that paints and pencils did not.

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Looking at War

By Susan Sontag

Robert Capas famous “The Falling Soldier” was taken in 1936 a few weeks after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

In June, 1938, Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas , her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war. Written during the preceding two years, while she and most of her intimates and fellow-writers were rapt by the advancing Fascist insurrection in Spain, the book was couched as a tardy reply to a letter from an eminent lawyer in London who had asked, “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” Woolf begins by observing tartly that a truthful dialogue between them may not be possible. For though they belong to the same class, “the educated class,” a vast gulf separates them: the lawyer is a man and she is a woman. Men make war. Men (most men) like war, or at least they find “some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting” that women (most women) do not seek or find. What does an educated—that is, privileged, well-off—woman like her know of war? Can her reactions to its horrors be like his?

Woolf proposes they test this “difficulty of communication” by looking at some images of war that the beleaguered Spanish government has been sending out twice a week to sympathizers abroad. Let’s see “whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things,” she writes. “This morning’s collection contains the photograph of what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a bird-cage hanging in what was presumably the sitting room.” One can’t always make out the subject, so thorough is the ruin of flesh and stone that the photographs depict. “However different the education, the traditions behind us,” Woolf says to the lawyer, “we”—and here women are the “we”—and he might well have the same response: “War, you say, is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped at whatever cost. And we echo your words. War is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped.”

Who believes today that war can be abolished? No one, not even pacifists. We hope only (so far in vain) to stop genocide and bring to justice those who commit gross violations of the laws of war (for there are laws of war, to which combatants should be held), and to stop specific wars by imposing negotiated alternatives to armed conflict. But protesting against war may not have seemed so futile or naïve in the nineteen-thirties. In 1924, on the tenth anniversary of the national mobilization in Germany for the First World War, the conscientious objector Ernst Friedrich published War Against War! ( Krieg dem Kriege! ), an album of more than a hundred and eighty photographs that were drawn mainly from German military and medical archives, and almost all of which were deemed unpublishable by government censors while the war was on. The book starts with pictures of toy soldiers, toy cannons, and other delights of male children everywhere, and concludes with pictures taken in military cemeteries. This is photography as shock therapy. Between the toys and the graves, the reader has an excruciating photo tour of four years of ruin, slaughter, and degradation: wrecked and plundered churches and castles, obliterated villages, ravaged forests, torpedoed passenger steamers, shattered vehicles, hanged conscientious objectors, naked personnel of military brothels, soldiers in death agonies after a poison-gas attack, skeletal Armenian children.

Friedrich did not assume that heartrending, stomach-turning pictures would speak for themselves. Each photograph has an impassioned caption in four languages (German, French, Dutch, and English), and the wickedness of militarist ideology is excoriated and mocked on every page. Immediately denounced by the German government and by veterans’ and other patriotic organizations—in some cities the police raided bookstores, and lawsuits were brought against public display of the photographs—Friedrich’s declaration of war against war was acclaimed by left-wing writers, artists, and intellectuals, as well as by the constituencies of the numerous antiwar leagues, who predicted that the book would have a decisive influence on public opinion. By 1930, War Against War! had gone through ten editions in Germany and been translated into many languages.

In 1928, in the Kellogg-Briand Pact, fifteen nations, including the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, solemnly renounced war as an instrument of national policy. Freud and Einstein were drawn into the debate four years later, in an exchange of letters published under the title “Why War?” Three Guineas , which appeared toward the close of nearly two decades of plangent denunciations of war and war’s horrors, was at least original in its focus on what was regarded as too obvious to be mentioned, much less brooded over: that war is a man’s game—that the killing machine has a gender, and it is male. Nevertheless, the temerity of Woolf’s version of “Why War?” does not make her revulsion against war any less conventional in its rhetoric, and in its summations, rich in repeated phrases. Photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus.

Woolf professes to believe that the shock of such pictures cannot fail to unite people of good will. Although she and the lawyer are separated by the age-old affinities of feeling and practice of their respective sexes, he is hardly a standard-issue bellicose male. After all, his question was not, What are your thoughts about preventing war? It was, How in your opinion are we to prevent war? Woolf challenges this “we” at the start of her book, but after some pages devoted to the feminist point she abandons it.

“Here then on the table before us are photographs,” she writes of the thought experiment she is proposing to the reader as well as to the spectral lawyer, who is eminent enough to have K.C., King’s Counsel, after his name—and may or may not be a real person. Imagine a spread of loose photographs extracted from an envelope that arrived in the morning mail. They show the mangled bodies of adults and children. They show how war evacuates, shatters, breaks apart, levels the built world. A bomb has torn open the side of a house. To be sure, a cityscape is not made of flesh. Still, sheared-off buildings are almost as eloquent as body parts (Kabul; Sarajevo; East Mostar; Grozny; sixteen acres of Lower Manhattan after September 11, 2001; the refugee camp in Jenin). Look, the photographs say, this is what it’s like. This is what war does . And that, that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins . Woolf believes that not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them, not to strive to abolish what causes this havoc, this carnage, is a failure of imagination, of empathy.

But surely the photographs could just as well foster greater militancy on behalf of the Republic. Isn’t this what they were meant to do? The agreement between Woolf and the lawyer seems entirely presumptive, with the grisly photographs confirming an opinion already held in common. Had his question been, How can we best contribute to the defense of the Spanish Republic against the forces of militarist and clerical fascism?, the photographs might have reinforced a belief in the justness of that struggle.

The pictures Woolf has conjured up do not in fact show what war—war in general—does. They show a particular way of waging war, a way at that time routinely described as “barbaric,” in which civilians are the target. General Franco was using the tactics of bombardment, massacre, torture, and the killing and mutilation of prisoners that he had perfected as a commanding officer in Morocco in the nineteen-twenties. Then, more acceptably to ruling powers, his victims had been Spain’s colonial subjects, darker-hued and infidels to boot; now his victims were compatriots. To read in the pictures, as Woolf does, only what confirms a general abhorrence of war is to stand back from an engagement with Spain as a country with a history. It is to dismiss politics.

For Woolf, as for many antiwar polemicists, war is generic, and the images she describes are of anonymous, generic victims. The pictures sent out by the government in Madrid seem, improbably, not to have been labelled. (Or perhaps Woolf is simply assuming that a photograph should speak for itself.) But to those who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and injustice on the other, and that the fighting must go on, what matters is precisely who is killed and by whom. To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance. To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. During the fighting between Serbs and Croats at the beginning of the recent Balkan wars, the same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings. Alter the caption: alter the use of these deaths.

Photographs of mutilated bodies certainly can be used the way Woolf does, to vivify the condemnation of war, and may bring home, for a spell, a portion of its reality to those who have no experience of war at all. But someone who accepts that in the world as currently divided war can become inevitable, and even just, might reply that the photographs supply no evidence, none at all, for renouncing war—except to those for whom the notions of valor and of sacrifice have been emptied of meaning and credibility. The destructiveness of war—short of total destruction, which is not war but suicide—is not in itself an argument against waging war, unless one thinks (as few people actually do) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong: wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay on war, “The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force,” violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing. But to those who in a given situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt someone subjected to it into a martyr or a hero.

In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities that a modern life supplies for regarding—at a distance, through the medium of photography—other people’s pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses: a call for peace; a cry for revenge; or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen. Who can forget the three color pictures by Tyler Hicks that the New York Times ran on November 13, 2001, across the upper half of the first page of its daily section devoted to America’s new war? The triptych depicted the fate of a wounded Taliban soldier who had been found in a ditch by some Northern Alliance soldiers advancing toward Kabul. First panel: the soldier is being dragged on his back by two of his captors—one has grabbed an arm, the other a leg—along a rocky road. Second panel: he is surrounded, gazing up in terror as he is pulled to his feet. Third panel: he is supine with arms outstretched and knees bent, naked from the waist down, a bloodied heap left on the road by the dispersing military mob that has just finished butchering him. A good deal of stoicism is needed to get through the newspaper each morning, given the likelihood of seeing pictures that could make you cry. And the disgust and pity that pictures like Hicks’s inspire should not distract from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths you are not being shown.

Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in wars happening elsewhere is something constructed. Principally in the form that is registered by cameras, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view. In contrast to a written account, which, depending on its complexity of thought, references, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership, a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.

In the first important wars of which there are accounts by photographers, the Crimean War and the American Civil War, and in every other war until the First World War, combat itself was beyond the camera’s ken. As for the war photographs published between 1914 and 1918, nearly all anonymous, they were—insofar as they did convey something of the terrors and devastation endured—generally in the epic mode, and were usually depictions of an aftermath: corpse-strewn or lunar landscapes left by trench warfare; gutted French villages the war had passed through. The photographic monitoring of war as we know it had to wait for a radical upgrade of professional equipment: lightweight cameras, such as the Leica, using 35-mm. film that could be exposed thirty-six times before the camera needed to be reloaded. The Spanish Civil War was the first war to be witnessed (“covered”) in the modern sense: by a corps of professional photographers at the lines of military engagement and in the towns under bombardment, whose work was immediately seen in newspapers and magazines in Spain and abroad. Pictures could be taken in the thick of battle, military censorship permitting, and civilian victims and exhausted, begrimed soldiers studied up close. The war America waged in Vietnam, the first to be witnessed day after day by television cameras, introduced the home front to a new intimacy with death and destruction. Ever since, battles and massacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment. Creating a perch for a particular conflict in the consciousness of viewers exposed to dramas from everywhere requires the daily diffusion and rediffusion of snippets of footage about the conflict. The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images.

Non-stop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) surrounds us, but, when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite. Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image. In an era of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact form for memorizing it. The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall. Cite the most famous photograph taken during the Spanish Civil War, the Republican soldier “shot” by Robert Capa’s camera at the same moment he is hit by an enemy bullet, and virtually everyone who has heard of that war can summon to mind the grainy black-and-white image of a man in a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves collapsing backward on a hillock, his right arm flung behind him as his rifle leaves his grip—about to fall, dead, onto his own shadow.

It is a shocking image, and that is the point. Conscripted as part of journalism, images were expected to arrest attention, startle, surprise. As the old advertising slogan of Paris Match , founded in 1949, had it: “The weight of words, the shock of photos.” The hunt for more dramatic—as they’re often described—images drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the normality of a culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value. “Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be,” André Breton proclaimed. He called this aesthetic ideal “surrealist,” but, in a culture radically revamped by the ascendancy of mercantile values, to ask that images be jarring, clamorous, eye-opening seems like elementary realism or good business sense. How else to get attention for one’s product or one’s art? How else to make a dent when there is incessant exposure to images, and overexposure to a handful of images seen again and again? The image as shock and the image as cliché are two aspects of the same presence. Sixty-five years ago, all photographs were novelties to some degree. (It would have been inconceivable to Virginia Woolf—who did appear on the cover of Time in 1937—that one day her face would become a much reproduced image on T-shirts, book bags, refrigerator magnets, coffee mugs, mouse pads.) Atrocity photographs were scarce in the winter of 1936-37: the depiction of war’s horrors in the photographs Woolf discusses in Three Guineas seemed almost like clandestine knowledge. Our situation is altogether different. The ultra-familiar, ultra-celebrated image—of an agony, of ruin—is an unavoidable feature of our camera-mediated knowledge of war.

Photography has kept company with death ever since cameras were invented, in 1839. Because an image produced with a camera is, literally, a trace of something brought before the lens, photographs had an advantage over any painting as a memento of the vanished past and the dear departed. To seize death in the making was another matter: the camera’s reach remained limited as long as it had to be lugged about, set down, steadied. But, once the camera was emancipated from the tripod, truly portable, and equipped with a range finder and a variety of lenses that permitted unprecedented feats of close observation from a distant vantage point, picture-taking acquired an immediacy and authority greater than any verbal account in conveying the horror of mass-produced death. If there was one year when the power of photographs to define, not merely record, the most abominable realities trumped all the complex narratives, surely it was 1945, with the pictures taken in April and early May in Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau, in the first days after the camps were liberated, and those taken by Japanese witnesses such as Yosuke Yamahata in the days following the incineration of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in early August.

Photographs had the advantage of uniting two contradictory features. Their credentials of objectivity were inbuilt, yet they always had, necessarily, a point of view. They were a record of the real—incontrovertible, as no verbal account, however impartial, could be (assuming that they showed what they purported to show)—since a machine was doing the recording. And they bore witness to the real, since a person had been there to take them.

The photographs Woolf received are treated as windows on the war: transparent views of what they show. It was of no interest to her that each had an “author”—that photographs represent the view of someone—although it was precisely in the late nineteen-thirties that the profession of bearing individual witness to war and war’s atrocities with a camera was forged. Before, war photography had mostly appeared in daily and weekly newspapers. (Newspapers had been printing photographs since 1880.) By 1938, in addition to the older popular magazines that used photographs as illustrations—such as National Geographic and Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung , both founded in the late nineteenth century—there were large-circulation weekly magazines, notably the French Vu , the American Life , and the British Picture Post , devoted entirely to pictures (accompanied by brief texts keyed to the photos) and “picture stories” (four or five pictures by the same photographer attached to a story that further dramatized the images); in a newspaper, it was the photograph—and there was only one—that accompanied the story.

In a system based on the maximal reproduction and diffusion of images, witnessing requires star witnesses, renowned for their bravery and zeal. War photographers inherited what glamour going to war still had among the anti-bellicose, especially when the war was felt to be one of those rare conflicts in which someone of conscience would be impelled to take sides. In contrast to the 1914-18 war, which, it was clear to many of the victors, had been a colossal mistake, the second “world war” was unanimously felt by the winning side to have been a necessary war, a war that had to be fought. Photojournalism came into its own in the early nineteen-forties—wartime. This least controversial of modern wars, whose necessity was sealed by the full revelation of Nazi infamy in Europe, offered photojournalists a new legitimacy. There was little place for the left-wing dissidence that had informed much of the serious use of photographs in the interwar period, including Friedrich’s War Against War! and the early work of Robert Capa, the most celebrated figure in a generation of politically engaged photographers whose work centered on war and victimhood.

In 1947, Capa and a few friends formed a coöperative, the Magnum Photo Agency. Magnum’s charter, moralistic in the way of the founding charters of other international organizations and guilds created in the immediate postwar period, spelled out an enlarged, ethically weighted mission for photojournalists: to chronicle their own time as fair-minded witnesses free of chauvinistic prejudices. In Magnum’s voice, photography declared itself a global enterprise. The photographer’s beat was “the world.” He or she was a rover, with wars of unusual interest (for there were many wars) a favorite destination.

The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local. Armenians, the majority in diaspora, keep alive the memory of the Armenian genocide of 1915; Greeks don’t forget the sanguinary civil war in Greece that raged through most of the second half of the nineteen-forties. But for a war to break out of its immediate constituency and become a subject of international attention it must be regarded as something of an exception, as wars go, and represent more than the clashing interests of the belligerents themselves. Apart from the major world conflicts, most wars do not acquire the requisite fuller meaning. An example: the Chaco War (1932-35), a butchery engaged in by Bolivia (population one million) and Paraguay (three and a half million) that took the lives of a hundred thousand soldiers, and which was covered by a German photojournalist, Willi Ruge, whose superb closeup battle pictures are as forgotten as that war. But the Spanish Civil War, in the second half of the nineteen-thirties, the Serb and Croat wars against Bosnia in the mid-nineties, the drastic worsening of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that began in 2000—these relatively small wars were guaranteed the attention of many cameras because they were invested with the meaning of larger struggles: the Spanish Civil War because it was a stand against the Fascist menace, and was understood to be a dress rehearsal for the coming European, or “world,” war; the Bosnian war because it was the stand of a small, fledgling European country wishing to remain multicultural as well as independent against the dominant power in the region and its neo-Fascist program of ethnic cleansing; and the conflict in the Middle East because the United States supports the State of Israel. Indeed, it is felt by many who champion the Palestinian side that what is ultimately at stake, by proxy, in the struggle to end the Israeli domination of the territories captured in 1967 is the strength of the forces opposing the juggernaut of American-sponsored globalization, economic and cultural.

The memorable sites of suffering documented by admired photographers in the nineteen-fifties, sixties, and early seventies were mostly in Asia and Africa—Werner Bischof’s photographs of famine victims in India, Don McCullin’s pictures of war and famine in Biafra, W. Eugene Smith’s photographs of the victims of the lethal pollution of a Japanese fishing village. The Indian and African famines were not just “natural” disasters: they were preventable; they were crimes of the greatest magnitude. And what happened in Minamata was obviously a crime; the Chisso Corporation knew that it was dumping mercury-laden waste into the bay. (Smith was severely and permanently injured by Chisso goons who were ordered to put an end to his camera inquiry.) But war is the largest crime, and, starting in the mid-sixties, most of the best-known photographers covering wars set out to show war’s “real” face. The color photographs of tormented Vietnamese villagers and wounded American conscripts that Larry Burrows took and Life published, starting in 1962, certainly fortified the outcry against the American presence in Vietnam. Burrows was the first important photographer to do a whole war in color—another gain in verisimilitude and shock.

In the current political mood, the friendliest to the military in decades, the pictures of wretched hollow-eyed G.I.s that once seemed subversive of militarism and imperialism may seem inspirational. Their revised subject: ordinary American young men doing their unpleasant, ennobling duty.

The iconography of suffering has a long pedigree. The suffering most often deemed worthy of representation is that which is understood to be the product of wrath, divine or human. (Suffering brought on by natural causes, such as illness or childbirth, is scantily represented in the history of art; that brought on by accident virtually not at all—as if there were no such thing as suffering by inadvertence or misadventure.) The statue group of the writhing Laocoön and his sons, the innumerable versions in painting and sculpture of the Passion of Christ, and the immense visual catalogue of the fiendish executions of the Christian martyrs—these are surely intended to move and excite, to instruct and exemplify. The viewer may commiserate with the sufferer’s pain—and, in the case of the Christian saints, feel admonished or inspired by model faith and fortitude—but these are destinies beyond deploring or contesting.

It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is almost as keen as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. For a long time, in Christian art, depictions of Hell offered both of these elemental satisfactions. On occasion, the pretext might be a Biblical decapitation story (Holofernes, John the Baptist) or massacre yarn (the newborn Hebrew boys, the eleven thousand virgins) or some such, with the status of a real historical event and of an implacable fate. There was also the repertoire of hard-to-look-at cruelties from classical antiquity—the pagan myths, even more than the Christian stories, offer something for every taste. No moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties. Just the provocation: Can you look at this? There is the satisfaction at being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.

To shudder at Goltzius’s rendering, in his etching “The Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus” (1588), of a man’s face being chewed off his head is very different from shuddering at a photograph of a First World War veteran whose face has been shot away. One horror has its place in a complex subject—figures in a landscape—that displays the artist’s skill of eye and hand. The other is a camera’s record, from very near, of a real person’s unspeakably awful mutilation; that and nothing else. An invented horror can be quite overwhelming. (I, for one, find it difficult to look at Titian’s great painting of the flaying of Marsyas, or, indeed, at any picture of this subject.) But there is shame as well as shock in looking at the closeup of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether we like it or not.

In each instance, the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look. Those with the stomach to look are playing a role authorized by many glorious depictions of suffering. Torment, a canonical subject in art, is often represented in painting as a spectacle, something being watched (or ignored) by other people. The implication is: No, it cannot be stopped—and the mingling of inattentive with attentive onlookers underscores this.

The practice of representing atrocious suffering as something to be deplored, and, if possible, stopped, enters the history of images with a specific subject: the sufferings endured by a civilian population at the hands of a victorious army on the rampage. It is a quintessentially secular subject, which emerges in the seventeenth century, when contemporary realignments of power become material for artists. In 1633, Jacques Callot published a suite of eighteen etchings titled The Miseries and Misfortunes of War , which depicted the atrocities committed against civilians by French troops during the invasion and occupation of his native Lorraine in the early sixteen-thirties. (Six small etchings on the same subject that Callot had executed prior to the large series appeared in 1635, the year of his death.) The view is wide and deep; these are scenes with many figures, scenes from a history, and each caption is a sententious comment in verse on the various energies and dooms portrayed in the images. Callot begins with a plate showing the recruitment of soldiers; brings into view ferocious combat, massacre, pillage, and rape, the engines of torture and execution (strappado, gallows tree, firing squad, stake, wheel), and the revenge of the peasants on the soldiers; and ends with a distribution of rewards. The insistence in plate after plate on the savagery of a conquering army is startling and without precedent, but the French soldiers are only the leading malefactors in the orgy of violence, and there is room in Callot’s Christian humanist sensibility not just to mourn the end of the independent Duchy of Lorraine but to record the postwar plight of destitute soldiers who squat on the side of the road, begging for alms.

Callot had his successors, such as Hans Ulrich Franck, a minor German artist who, in 1643, toward the end of the Thirty Years’ War, began making what would be (by 1656) a suite of twenty-five etchings depicting soldiers killing peasants. But the preëminent concentration on the horrors of war and the vileness of soldiers run amok is Goya’s, in the early nineteenth century. The Disasters of War , a numbered sequence of eighty-three etchings made between 1810 and 1820 (and first published, except for three plates, in 1863, thirty-five years after his death), depicts the atrocities perpetrated by Napoleon’s soldiers, who invaded Spain in 1808 to quell the insurrection against French rule. Goya’s images move the viewer close to the horror. All the trappings of the spectacular have been eliminated: the landscape is an atmosphere, a darkness, barely sketched in. War is not a spectacle. And Goya’s print series is not a narrative: each image, captioned with a brief phrase lamenting the wickedness of the invaders and the monstrousness of the suffering they inflicted, stands independent of the others. The cumulative effect is devastating.

The ghoulish cruelties in The Disasters of War are meant to awaken, shock, wound the viewer. Goya’s art, like Dostoyevsky’s, seems a turning point in the history of moral feelings and of sorrow—as deep, as original, as demanding. With Goya, a new standard for responsiveness to suffering enters art. (And new subjects for fellow-feeling: for example, the painting of an injured laborer being carried away from a construction site.) The account of war’s cruelties is constructed as an assault on the sensibility of the viewer. The expressive phrases in script below each image comment on the provocation. While the image, like all images, is an invitation to look, the caption, more often than not, insists on the difficulty of doing just that. A voice, presumably the artist’s, badgers the viewer: Can you bear this? One caption declares, “ No se puede mirar” (“One can’t look”). Another says, “ Esto es malo” (“This is bad”). “Esto es peor” (“This is worse”), another retorts.

The caption of a photograph is traditionally neutral, informative: a date, a place, names. A reconnaissance photograph from the First World War (the first war in which cameras were used extensively for military intelligence) was unlikely to be captioned “Can’t wait to overrun this!” or the X-ray of a multiple fracture to be annotated “Patient will probably have a limp!” It seems no less inappropriate to speak for the photograph in the photographer’s voice, offering assurances of the image’s veracity, as Goya does in The Disasters of War , writing beneath one image, “ Yo lo ví” (“I saw this”) . And beneath another, “ Esto es lo verdadero” (“This is the truth”). Of course the photographer saw it. And, unless there’s been some tampering or misrepresenting, it is the truth.

Ordinary language fixes the difference between handmade images like Goya’s and photographs through the convention that artists “make” drawings and paintings while photographers “take” photographs. But the photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace (not a construction made out of disparate photographic traces), cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude. Moreover, fiddling with the picture long antedates the era of digital photography and Photoshop manipulations: it has always been possible for a photograph to misrepresent. A painting or drawing is judged a fake when it turns out not to be by the artist to whom it had been attributed. A photograph—or a filmed document available on television or the Internet—is judged a fake when it turns out to be deceiving the viewer about the scene it purports to depict.

That the atrocities perpetrated by Napoleon’s soldiers in Spain didn’t happen exactly as Goya drew them hardly disqualifies The Disasters of War . Goya’s images are a synthesis. Things like this happened. In contrast, a single photograph or filmstrip claims to represent exactly what was before the camera’s lens. A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence. But evidence of what? The suspicion that Capa’s “Death of a Republican Soldier”—recently retitled “The Falling Soldier,” in the authoritative compilation of Capa’s work—may not show what it has always been said to show continues to haunt discussions of war photography. Everyone is a literalist when it comes to photographs.

Images of the sufferings endured in war are so widely disseminated now that it is easy to forget that, historically, photographers have offered mostly positive images of the warrior’s trade, and of the satisfactions of starting a war or continuing to fight one. If governments had their way, war photography, like much war poetry, would drum up support for soldiers’ sacrifices. Indeed, war photography begins with such a mission, such a disgrace. The war was the Crimean War, and the photographer, Roger Fenton, invariably called the first war photographer, was no less than that war’s “official” photographer, having been sent to the Crimea in early 1855 by the British government, at the instigation of Prince Albert. Acknowledging the need to counteract the alarming printed accounts of the dangers and privations endured by the British soldiers dispatched there the previous year, the government invited a well-known professional photographer to give another, more positive impression of the increasingly unpopular war.

Edmund Gosse, in Father and Son , his memoir of a mid-nineteenth-century English childhood, relates how the Crimean War penetrated even his stringently pious, unworldly family, which belonged to an evangelical sect called the Plymouth Brethren: “The declaration of war with Russia brought the first breath of outside life into our Calvinist cloister. My parents took in a daily newspaper, which they had never done before, and events in picturesque places, which my Father and I looked out on the map, were eagerly discussed.” War was, and still is, the most irresistible—and picturesque—news, along with that invaluable substitute for war, international sports. But this war was more than news. It was bad news. The authoritative, pictureless London newspaper to which Gosse’s parents had succumbed, the Times , attacked the military leadership whose incompetence was responsible for the war’s dragging on, with so much loss of British life. The toll on the soldiers from causes other than combat was horrendous—twenty-two thousand died of illnesses; many thousands lost limbs to frostbite during the long Russian winter of the protracted siege of Sebastopol—and several of the military engagements were disasters. It was still winter when Fenton arrived in the Crimea for a four-month stay, having contracted to publish his photographs (in the form of engravings) in a less venerable and less critical weekly paper, the Illustrated London News , exhibit them in a gallery, and market them as a book upon his return home.

Under instructions from the War Office not to photograph the dead, the maimed, or the ill, and precluded from photographing most other subjects by the cumbersome technology of picture-taking, Fenton went about rendering the war as a dignified all-male group outing. With each image requiring a separate chemical preparation in the darkroom and a long exposure time, he could photograph British officers in open-air staff meetings or common soldiers tending the cannons only after asking them to stand or sit together, follow his directions, and hold still. His pictures are tableaux of military life behind the front lines; the war—movement, disorder, drama—stays off-camera. The one photograph Fenton took in the Crimea that reaches beyond benign documentation is “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” whose title evokes the consolation offered by the Biblical Psalmist as well as the disaster in which six hundred British soldiers were ambushed on the plain above Balaklava—Tennyson called the site “the valley of Death” in his memorial poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Fenton’s memorial photograph is a portrait of absence, of death without the dead. It is the only photograph that would not have needed to be staged, for all it shows is a wide rutted road, studded with rocks and cannonballs, that curves onward across a barren rolling plain to the distant void.

A bolder portfolio of after-the-battle images of death and ruin, pointing not to losses suffered but to a fearsome British triumph over the enemy, was made by another photographer who had visited the Crimean War. Felice Beato, a naturalized Englishman (he was born in Venice), was the first photographer to attend a number of wars: besides being in the Crimea in 1855, he was at the Sepoy Rebellion (what the British call the Indian Mutiny) in 1857-58, the Second Opium War in China, in 1860, and the Sudanese colonial wars in 1885. Three years after Fenton made his anodyne images of a war that did not go well for England, Beato was celebrating the fierce victory of the British Army over a mutiny of native soldiers under its command, the first important challenge to British rule in India. Beato’s “Ruins of Sikandarbagh Palace,” an arresting photograph of a palace in Lucknow that has been gutted by bombardment, shows the courtyard strewn with the rebels’ bones.

The first full-scale attempt to document a war was carried out a few years later, during the American Civil War, by a firm of Northern photographers headed by Mathew Brady, who had made several official portraits of President Lincoln. The Brady war pictures—most were shot by Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan, although their employer was invariably credited with them—showed conventional subjects, such as encampments populated by officers and foot soldiers, towns in war’s way, ordnance, ships, and also, most famously, dead Union and Confederate soldiers lying on the blasted ground of Gettysburg and Antietam. Though access to the battlefield came as a privilege extended to Brady and his team by Lincoln himself, the photographers were not commissioned, as Fenton had been. Their status evolved in rather typical American fashion, with nominal government sponsorship giving way to the force of entrepreneurial and freelance motives.

The first justification for the brutally legible pictures of a field of dead soldiers was the simple duty to record. “The camera is the eye of history,” Brady is supposed to have said. And history, invoked as truth beyond appeal, was allied with the rising prestige of a certain notion of subjects needing more attention, known as realism, which was soon to have a host of defenders among novelists as well as photographers. In the name of realism, one was permitted—required—to show unpleasant, hard facts. Such pictures also convey “a useful moral” by showing “the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry,” as Gardner wrote in a text accompanying O’Sullivan’s picture of fallen Confederate soldiers, their agonized faces clearly visible. “Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing another such calamity falling upon the nation.” But the frankness of the most memorable pictures in an album of photographs by Gardner and other Brady photographers, which Gardner published after the war, did not mean that he and his colleagues had necessarily photographed their subjects as they found them. To photograph was to compose (with living subjects, to pose); the desire to arrange elements in the picture did not vanish because the subject was immobilized, or immobile.

Not surprisingly, many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with. Roger Fenton, after reaching the much shelled valley near Sebastopol in his horse-drawn darkroom, made two exposures from the same tripod position: in the first version of the celebrated photograph he was to call “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” (despite the title, it was not across this landscape that the Light Brigade made its doomed charge), the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road; before taking the second picture—the one that is always reproduced—he oversaw the scattering of cannonballs on the road itself. A picture of a desolate site where a great deal of dying had indeed recently taken place, Beato’s “Ruins of Sikandarbagh Palace,” involved a more thorough theatricalization of its subject, and was one of the first attempts to suggest with a camera the horrific in war. The attack occurred in November, 1857, after which the victorious British troops and loyal Indian units searched the palace room by room, bayoneting the eighteen hundred surviving Sepoy defenders who were now their prisoners and throwing their bodies into the courtyard; vultures and dogs did the rest. For the photograph he took in March or April, 1858, Beato constructed the courtyard as a deathscape, stationing some natives by two pillars in the rear and distributing human bones about the foreground.

At least they were old bones. It’s now known that the Brady team rearranged and displaced some of the recently dead at Gettysburg; the picture titled “The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg” in fact shows a dead Confederate soldier who was moved from where he had fallen on the field to a more photogenic site, a cove formed by several boulders flanking a barricade of rocks, and includes a prop rifle that Gardner leaned against the barricade beside the corpse. (It seems not to have been the special rifle a sharpshooter would have used, but a common infantryman’s rifle; Gardner didn’t know this or didn’t care.)

Only starting with the Vietnam War can we be virtually certain that none of the best-known photographs were setups. And this is essential to the moral authority of these images. The signature Vietnam War horror photograph, from 1972, taken by Huynh Cong Ut, of children from a village that has just been doused with American napalm running down the highway, shrieking with pain, belongs to the universe of photographs that cannot possibly be posed. The same is true of the well-known pictures from the most widely photographed wars since.

That there have been so few staged war photographs since the Vietnam War probably should not be attributed to higher standards of journalistic probity. One part of the explanation is that it was in Vietnam that television became the defining medium for showing images of war, and the intrepid lone photographer, Nikon or Leica in hand, operating out of sight much of the time, now had to compete with, and endure the proximity of, TV crews. There are always witnesses to a filming. Technically, the possibilities for doctoring or electronically manipulating pictures are greater than ever—almost unlimited. But the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging them for the camera, seems on its way to becoming a lost art.

Central to modern expectations, and modern ethical feeling, is the conviction that war is an aberration, if an unstoppable one. That peace is the norm, if an unattainable one. This, of course, is not the way war has been regarded throughout history. War has been the norm and peace the exception.

Descriptions of the exact fashion in which bodies are injured and killed in combat is a recurring climax in the stories told in the Iliad . War is seen as something men do, inveterately, undeterred by the accumulation of suffering it inflicts; to represent war in words or in pictures requires a keen, unflinching detachment. When Leonardo da Vinci gives instructions for a battle painting, his worry is that artists will lack the courage or the imagination to show war in all its ghastliness: “Make the conquered and beaten pale, with brows raised and knit, and the skin above their brows furrowed with pain . . . and the teeth apart as with crying out in lamentation. . . . Make the dead partly or entirely covered with dust . . . and let the blood be seen by its color flowing in a sinuous stream from the corpse to the dust. Others in the death agony grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with their fists clenched against their bodies, and the legs distorted.” The concern is that the images won’t be sufficiently upsetting: not concrete, not detailed enough.

Pity can entail a moral judgment if, as Aristotle suggests, pity is considered to be the emotion that we owe only to those enduring undeserved misfortune. But pity, far from being the natural twin of fear in the dramas of catastrophic misfortune, seems diluted—distracted—by fear, while fear (dread, terror) usually manages to swamp pity. Leonardo is suggesting that the artist’s gaze be, literally, pitiless. The image should appall, and in that terribilità lies a challenging kind of beauty.

That a gory battlescape could be beautiful—in the sublime or awesome or tragic register of the beautiful—is a commonplace about images of war made by artists. The idea does not sit well when applied to images taken by cameras: to find beauty in war photographs seems heartless. But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins. To acknowledge the beauty of photographs of the World Trade Center ruins in the months following the attack seemed frivolous, sacrilegious. The most people dared say was that the photographs were “surreal,” a hectic euphemism behind which the disgraced notion of beauty cowered. But they were beautiful, many of them—by veteran photographers such as Gilles Peress, Susan Meiselas, and Joel Meyerowitz and by many little-known and nonprofessional photographers. The site itself, the mass graveyard that had received the name Ground Zero, was, of course, anything but beautiful. Photographs tend to transform, whatever their subject; and as an image something may be beautiful—or terrifying, or unbearable, or quite bearable—as it is not in real life.

Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems “aesthetic”; that is, too much like art. The dual powers of photography—to generate documents and to create works of visual art—have produced some remarkable exaggerations about what photographers ought or ought not to do. These days, most exaggeration is of the puritanical kind. Photographs that depict suffering shouldn’t be beautiful, as captions shouldn’t moralize. In this view, a beautiful photograph drains attention from the sobering subject and turns it toward the medium itself, inviting the viewer to look “aesthetically,” and thereby compromising the picture’s status as a document. The photograph gives mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle!

Take one of the most poignant images from the First World War: a column of English soldiers blinded by poison gas—each rests his hand on the shoulder of the man ahead of him—stumbling toward a dressing station. It could be an image from one of the searing movies made about the war—King Vidor’s The Big Parade , of 1925, or G. W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 , Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front , and Howard Hawks’s Dawn Patrol , all from 1930. The way in which still photography finds its perfection in the reconstruction of battle scenes in the great war movies has begun to backfire on the photography of war. What assured the authenticity of Steven Spielberg’s much admired re-creation of the Omaha Beach landing on D Day in Saving Private Ryan (1998) was that it was based on, among other sources, the photographs taken with immense bravery by Robert Capa during the landing. But a war photograph seems inauthentic, even though there is nothing staged about it, when it looks like a still from a movie. Sebastião Salgado, a photographer who specializes in world misery (including but not restricted to the effects of war), has been the principal target of the new campaign against the inauthenticity of the beautiful. Particularly with the seven-year project he calls “Migrations: Humanity in Transition,” Salgado has come under steady attack for producing spectacular, beautifully composed big pictures that are said to be “cinematic.”

The sanctimonious Family of Man-style rhetoric that accompanies Salgado’s exhibitions and books has worked to the detriment of the pictures, however unfair this may be. The pictures have also been sourly treated in response to the highly commercialized situations in which, typically, Salgado’s portraits of misery are seen. But the problem is in the pictures themselves, not the way they are exhibited: in their focus on the powerless, reduced to their powerlessness. It is significant that the powerless are not named in the captions. A portrait that declines to name its subject becomes complicit, if inadvertently, in the cult of celebrity that has fuelled an insatiable appetite for the opposite sort of photograph: to grant only the famous their names demotes the rest to representative instances of their occupations, their ethnicities, their plights. Taken in thirty-five countries, Salgado’s migration pictures group together, under this single heading, a host of different causes and kinds of distress. Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to “care” more. It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local, political intervention. With a subject conceived on this scale, compassion can only flounder—and make abstract. But all politics, like all history, is concrete.

It used to be thought, when candid images were not common, that showing something that needed to be seen, bringing a painful reality closer, was bound to goad viewers to feel—feel more. In a world in which photography is brilliantly at the service of consumerist manipulations, this naïve relation to poignant scenes of suffering is much less plausible. Morally alert photographers and ideologues of photography are concerned with the issues of exploitation of sentiment (pity, compassion, indignation) in war photography, and how to avoid rote ways of arousing feeling.

Photographer-witnesses may try to make the spectacular not spectacular. But their efforts can never cancel the tradition in which suffering has been understood throughout most of Western history. To feel the pulse of Christian iconography in certain wartime or disaster-time photographs is not a sentimental projection. It would be hard not to discern the lineaments of the Pietà in W. Eugene Smith’s picture of a woman in Minamata cradling her deformed, blind, and deaf daughter, or the template of the Descent from the Cross in several of Don McCullin’s pictures of dying American soldiers in Vietnam.

The problem is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs. This remembering through photographs eclipses other forms of understanding—and remembering. The concentration camps—that is, the photographs taken when the camps were liberated, in 1945—are most of what people associate with Nazism and the miseries of the Second World War. Hideous deaths (by genocide, starvation, and epidemic) are most of what people retain of the clutch of iniquities and failures that have taken place in postcolonial Africa.

To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture. Even a writer as steeped in nineteenth-century and early-modern literary solemnities as W. G. Sebald was moved to seed his lamentation-narratives of lost lives, lost nature, lost cityscapes with photographs. Sebald was not just an elegist; he was a militant elegist. Remembering, he wanted the reader to remember, too.

Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they don’t help us much to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. Consider one of the most unforgettable images of the war in Bosnia, a photograph of which the New York Times foreign correspondent John Kifner wrote, “The image is stark, one of the most enduring of the Balkan wars: a Serb militiaman casually kicking a dying Muslim woman in the head. It tells you everything you need to know.” But of course it doesn’t tell us everything we need to know.

From the identification supplied by the photographer, Ron Haviv, we learn that the photograph was taken in the town of Bijeljina in April, 1992, the first month of the Serb rampage through Bosnia. From behind, we see a uniformed Serb soldier, a youthful figure with sunglasses perched on the top of his head, a cigarette between the second and third fingers of his raised left hand, rifle dangling in his right hand, right leg poised to kick a woman lying face down on the sidewalk between two other bodies. The photograph doesn’t tell us that she is Muslim, but she is not likely to have been labelled in any other way, or why would she and the two others be lying there, as if dead (why “dying”?), under the gaze of some Serb soldiers? In fact, the photograph tells us very little—except that war is hell, and that graceful young men with guns are capable of kicking in the head overweight older women lying helpless, or already killed.

The pictures of Bosnian atrocities were seen soon after they took place. Like pictures from the Vietnam War, such as Ron Haberle’s documents of the massacre by a company of American soldiers of some five hundred unarmed civilians in the village of My Lai in March, 1968, they became important in bolstering indignation at this war which had been far from inevitable, far from intractable; and could have been stopped much sooner. Therefore one could feel an obligation to look at these pictures, gruesome as they were, because there was something to be done, right now, about what they depicted. Other issues are raised when the public is invited to respond to a dossier of hitherto unknown pictures of horrors long past.

An example: a trove of photographs of black victims of lynching in small towns in the United States between the eighteen-nineties and the nineteen-thirties, which provided a shattering, revelatory experience for the thousands who saw them in a gallery in New York in 2000. The lynching pictures tell us about human wickedness. About inhumanity. They force us to think about the extent of the evil unleashed specifically by racism. Intrinsic to the perpetration of this evil is the shamelessness of photographing it. The pictures were taken as souvenirs and made, some of them, into postcards; more than a few show grinning spectators, good churchgoing citizens, as most of them had to be, posing for a camera with the backdrop of a naked, charred, mutilated body hanging from a tree. The display of the pictures makes us spectators, too.

What is the point of exhibiting these pictures? To awaken indignation? To make us feel “bad”; that is, to appall and sadden? To help us mourn? Is looking at such pictures really necessary, given that these horrors lie in a past remote enough to be beyond punishment? Are we the better for seeing these images? Do they actually teach us anything? Don’t they rather just confirm what we already know (or want to know)?

All these questions were raised at the time of the exhibition and afterward when a book of the photographs, Without Sanctuary, was published. Some people, it was said, might dispute the need for this grisly photographic display, lest it cater to voyeuristic appetites and perpetuate images of black victimization—or simply numb the mind. Nevertheless, it was argued, there is an obligation to “examine”—the more clinical “examine” is substituted for “look at”—the pictures. It was further argued that submitting to the ordeal should help us understand such atrocities not as the acts of “barbarians” but as the reflection of a belief system, racism, that by defining one people as less human than another legitimatizes torture and murder. But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what barbarians look like. (They look like everybody else.)

That being said, whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, whom do we believe we have the right to blame? The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no less innocent than the young African-American men (and a few women) who were butchered and hanged from trees in small-town America. More than a hundred thousand German civilians, three-fourths of them women, were incinerated in the R.A.F. fire bombing of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945; seventy-two thousand civilians were killed by the American bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The roll call could be much longer. Again, whom do we wish to blame? What atrocities from the incurable past do we think we are obliged to see?

Probably, if we are Americans, we think that it would be “morbid” to go out of our way to look at pictures of burned victims of atomic bombing or the napalmed flesh of the civilian victims of the American war on Vietnam but that we have some kind of duty to look at the lynching pictures—if we belong to the party of the right-thinking, which on this issue is now large. A stepped-up recognition of the monstrousness of the slave system that once existed, unquestioned by most, in the United States is a national project of recent decades that many Euro-Americans feel some tug of obligation to join. This ongoing project is a great achievement, a benchmark of civic virtue. But acknowledgment of American use of disproportionate firepower in war (in violation of one of the cardinal laws of war) is very much not a national project. A museum devoted to the history of America’s wars that included the vicious war the United States fought against guerrillas in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902 (expertly excoriated by Mark Twain), and that fairly presented the arguments for and against using the atomic bomb in 1945 on the Japanese cities, with photographic evidence that showed what those weapons did, would be regarded—now more than ever—as an unpatriotic endeavor.

Consider two widespread ideas—now fast approaching the stature of platitudes—on the impact of photography. Since I find these ideas formulated in my own essays on photography, the earliest of which was written thirty years ago, I feel an irresistible temptation to quarrel with them.

The first idea is that public attention is steered by the attentions of the media—which means images. When there are photographs, a war becomes “real.” Thus, the protest against the Vietnam War was mobilized by images. The feeling that something had to be done about the war in Bosnia was built from the attentions of journalists: “the CNN effect,” it was sometimes called, which brought images of Sarajevo under siege into hundreds of millions of living rooms night after night for more than three years. These examples illustrate the determining influence of photographs in shaping what catastrophes and crises we pay attention to, what we care about, and ultimately what evaluations are placed on these conflicts.

The second idea—it might seem the converse of what has just been described—is that in a world saturated, even hypersaturated, with images, those which should matter to us have a diminishing effect: we become callous. In the end, such images make us a little less able to feel, to have our conscience pricked.

In the first of the six essays in On Photography , which was published in 1977, I argued that while an event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs, after repeated exposure it also becomes less real. As much as they create sympathy, I wrote, photographs shrivel sympathy. Is this true? I thought it was when I wrote it. I’m not so sure now. What is the evidence that photographs have a diminishing impact, that our culture of spectacle neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities?

The question turns on a view of the principal medium of the news, television. An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen. Images shown on television are, by definition, images of which, sooner or later, one tires. What looks like callousness has its origin in the instability of attention that television is organized to arouse and to satiate, by its surfeit of images. Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content. Image-flow precludes a privileged image. The whole point of television is that one can switch channels, that it is normal to switch channels: to become restless, bored. Consumers droop. They need to be restimulated, jump-started, again and again. Content is no more than one of these stimulants. A more reflective engagement with content would require a certain intensity of awareness—just what is weakened by the expectations brought to images disseminated by the media. The leaching out of content is what contributes most to the deadening of feeling.

The argument that modern life consists of a menu of horrors by which we are corrupted and to which we gradually become habituated is a founding idea of the critique of modernity—a tradition almost as old as modernity itself. In 1800, Wordsworth, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads , denounced the corruption of sensibility produced by “the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.” This process of overstimulation acts “to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind” and “reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.”

Wordsworth singled out the blunting of mind produced by “daily” events and “hourly” news of “extraordinary incident.” (In 1800!) Exactly what kind of events and incidents was discreetly left to the reader’s imagination. Some sixty years later, another great poet and cultural diagnostician—French, and therefore as licensed to be hyperbolic as the English are prone to understate—offered a more heated version of the same charge. Here is Baudelaire writing in his journal in the early eighteen-sixties: “It is impossible to glance through any newspaper, no matter what the day, the month or the year, without finding on every line the most frightful traces of human perversity. . . . Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, lecheries, tortures, the evil deeds of princes, of nations, of private individuals; an orgy of universal atrocity. And it is with this loathsome appetizer that civilized man daily washes down his morning repast.”

Newspapers did not yet carry photographs when Baudelaire wrote. But this doesn’t make his accusatory description of the bourgeois sitting down with his morning newspaper to breakfast with an array of the world’s horrors any different from the contemporary critique of how much desensitizing horror we take in every day, via television as well as the morning paper. Newer technology provides a non-stop feed: as many images of disaster and atrocity as we can make time to look at.

Since On Photography was published, many critics have suggested that the agonies of war—thanks to television—have devolved into a nightly banality. Flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing our capacity to react. Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb. So runs the familiar diagnosis. But what is really being asked for here? That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More generally, that we work toward an “ecology of images,” as I suggested in On Photography ? But there isn’t going to be an ecology of images. No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.

The view proposed in On Photography —that our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images—might be called the conservative critique of the diffusion of such images. I call this argument “conservative” because it is the sense of reality that is eroded. There is still a reality that exists independent of the attempts to weaken its authority. The argument is in fact a defense of reality and the imperilled standards for responding to it more fully. In the more radical—cynical—spin on this critique, there is nothing to defend, for, paradoxical as it may sound, there is no reality anymore. The vast maw of modernity has chewed up reality and spat the whole mess out as images. According to a highly influential analysis, we live in a “society of spectacle.” Each thing has to be turned into a spectacle to be real—that is, interesting—to us. People themselves become images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media.

Fancy rhetoric, this. And very persuasive to many, because one of the characteristics of modernity is that people like to feel they can anticipate their own experience. (This view is associated in particular with the writings of the late Guy Debord, who thought he was describing an illusion, a hoax, and of Jean Baudrillard, who claims to believe that images, simulated realities, are all that exists now; it seems to be something of a French specialty.) It is common to say that war, like everything else that seems to be real, is médiatique . This was the diagnosis of several distinguished French day-trippers to Sarajevo during the siege, among them André Glucksmann: that the war would be won or lost not by anything that happened in Sarajevo, or Bosnia generally, but by what happened in the media. It is often asserted that “the West” has increasingly come to see war itself as a spectacle. Reports of the death of reality—like the death of reason, the death of the intellectual, the death of serious literature—seem to have been accepted without much reflection by many who are attempting to understand what feels wrong, or empty, or idiotically triumphant in contemporary politics and culture.

To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment—a mature style of viewing that is a prime acquisition of the “modern,” and a prerequisite for dismantling traditional forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify “the world” with those zones in the rich countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people’s pain, just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality.

Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)

Could one be mobilized actively to oppose war by an image (or a group of images), as one might be enrolled among the opponents of capital punishment by reading, say, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy or Turgenev’s “The Execution of Troppmann,” an account of a night spent with a notorious criminal who is about to be guillotined? A narrative seems likely to be more effective than an image. Partly it is a question of the length of time one is obliged to look, and to feel. No photograph, or portfolio of photographs, can unfold, go further, and further still, as does The Ascent (1977), by the Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko, the most affecting film about the horror of war I know.

Among single antiwar images, the huge photograph that Jeff Wall made in 1992 entitled “Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986)” seems to me exemplary in its thoughtfulness, coherence, and passion. The antithesis of a document, the picture, a Cibachrome transparency seven and a half feet high and more than thirteen feet wide and mounted on a light box, shows figures posed in a landscape, a blasted hillside, that was constructed in the artist’s studio. Wall, who is Canadian, was never in Afghanistan. The ambush is a made-up event in a conflict he had read about. His imagination of war (he cites Goya as an inspiration) is in the tradition of nineteenth-century history painting and other forms of history-as-spectacle that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—just before the invention of the camera—such as tableaux vivants, wax displays, dioramas, and panoramas, which made the past, especially the immediate past, seem astonishingly, disturbingly real.

The figures in Wall’s visionary photo-work are “realistic,” but, of course, the image is not. Dead soldiers don’t talk. Here they do.

Thirteen Russian soldiers in bulky winter uniforms and high boots are scattered about a pocked, blood-splashed pit lined with loose rocks and the litter of war: shell casings, crumpled metal, a boot that holds the lower part of a leg. The soldiers, slaughtered in the Soviet Union’s own late folly of a colonial war, were never buried. A few still have their helmets on. The head of one kneeling figure, talking animatedly, foams with his red brain matter. The atmosphere is warm, convivial, fraternal. Some slouch, leaning on an elbow, or sit, chatting, their opened skulls and destroyed hands on view. One man bends over another, who lies on his side in a posture of heavy sleep, perhaps encouraging him to sit up. Three men are horsing around: one with a huge wound in his belly straddles another, who is lying prone, while the third, kneeling, dangles what might be a watch before the laughing man on his stomach. One soldier, helmeted, legless, has turned to a comrade some distance away, an alert smile on his face. Below him are two who don’t seem quite up to the resurrection and lie supine, their bloodied heads hanging down the stony incline.

Engulfed by the image, which is so accusatory, one could fantasize that the soldiers might turn and talk to us. But no, no one is looking out of the picture at the viewer. There’s no threat of protest. They’re not about to yell at us to bring a halt to that abomination which is war. They are not represented as terrifying to others, for among them (far left) sits a white-garbed Afghan scavenger, entirely absorbed in going through somebody’s kit bag, of whom they take no note, and entering the picture above them (top right), on the path winding down the slope, are two Afghans, perhaps soldiers themselves, who, it would seem from the Kalashnikovs collected near their feet, have already stripped the dead soldiers of their weapons. These dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses—or in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? “We”—this “we” is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through—don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is—and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right. ♦

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By Winthrop Sargeant

By Calvin Tomkins

The Tortured Poetry of Taylor Swift’s New Album

By Amanda Petrusich

Jonathan Haidt Wants You to Take Away Your Kid’s Phone

By David Remnick

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest hemingway, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

A Farewell to Arms takes place in Italy during World War I, and the lives of all the characters are marked by the war. Most of the characters, from Henry and Catherine down to the soldiers and shop owners whom Henry meets, are humanists who echo Hemingway's view that war is a senseless waste of life. The few characters that support the war are presented as zealots to be either feared, as in the case of the military police, or pitied, such as the young Italian patriot Gino . To Henry, the war is, at first, a necessary evil from which he distracts himself through drinking and sex. By the end of the novel, his experiences of the war have convinced him that it is a fundamentally unjust atrocity, which he seeks to escape at all costs with Catherine.

War ThemeTracker

War Quotes in A Farewell to Arms

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War and Military

Description

Throughout history, humankind has often used narrative images to depict scenes of victory and defeat in battles, as well as the toll war holds on individuals. Military art is nothing new, dating as far back as 3300 BCE when The Battlefield Palette was made — a predynastic cosmetic palette depicting a series of prisoners being led away from the field of battle, and wild animals scavenging on the deceased. Perhaps some of the more common or recognizable depictions of war can be attributed to those found in classical antiquity. The Alexander Mosaic — which was rediscovered in 1831 under layers of ash formed from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD — depicts the Battle of Issus, which occurred on November 5, 333 BCE. The mosaic, which was created using almost two million pieces of tesserae, shows the battle between the Macedonian forces led by Alexander the Great, and the Persian forces led by Darius III — a battle which would result in a victory for Alexander.

Fig. 1. Alexander Mosaic, Tesserae, 2nd century BCE. From the House of the Faun in Pompeii. Collection of the National Archaeological Museum, Naples.

Battle scenes were common in classical antiquity, and Greek paintings were often seen as a highly respected art form. As cities were often fighting amongst each other and foreign nations were threatening to conquer one another, it wasn't uncommon to come across pottery depicting scenes of war. In some instances, battles and warriors could be depicted in mythological terms or through the depiction of gods and goddesses fighting one another.

Fig. 2. Princeton Painter , Terracotta amphora (jar) , c.500-490 BCE. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Other depictions of war come in the form of portraiture. Jacque-Louis David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1802) pictures the French general as he leads his troops across the Alps in a campaign against the Austrians. Although Napoleon was not present when soldiers crossed the Alps — having followed behind a few days later, and on a mule — Napoleon and his horse dominate the canvas, emphasizing his authority and potential as a great leader and general. French troops can be seen hauling along a canon as they make their way up the mountain in the background.

Fig. 3. Jacque-Louis David , Napoleon Crossing the Alps , 1802, oil on canvas.

Heading towards the twentieth century, the glorification of war began declining. In turn, the most striking art depicting war were the pieces that emphasized the horror and casualties inflicted upon groups and individuals. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica , for instance, was painted as an immediate reaction to the bombing of the town of Guernica by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil War, and emphasizes the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals. Other artists, rather than working from a studio, were enlisted in the army and recorded their own experiences. During the Second World War, many artists were enlisted and worked on illustrating posters, war newspapers, murals, and field reports.

Fig. 4. Pablo Picasso , Guernica , 1937, oil on canvas. Collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofie.

Today, artists like Victor Juhasz , Elize McKelvey , Steve Mumford , Kristopher Battles , and Michael Fay work with various branches of the armed forces to detail the personal stories, as well as the technical aspects of war and military operations through illustration.

Fig. 5. Elize McKelvey , Mv22 Osprey Crew Chief in Nairobi Kenya . Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

Image Gallery

Related Artists

Related Time Periods

Related Essays

Belonging to the Realm of Ideas: A Look at Goya In Comparison to the Modern Day Illustration Practices of Andrea Kowch, Amy Cutler, and Shaun Tan
Re-Covering America

Tolstoy On War: Narrative Art and Historical Truth in "War and Peace"

In this Book

edited by Rick McPeak and Donna Tussing Orwin
Published by: Cornell University Press

Title Page, Copyright
Acknowledgments
Note to the Reader
Introduction
Donna Tussing Orwin
1 Tolstoy on War, Russia, and Empire
Dominic Lie
2 The Use of Historical Sources in War and Peace
Dan Ungurianuven
3 Moscow in 1812
Alexander M. Martin
4 The French at War
Alan Forrest
5 Symposium of Quotations
Gary Saul Morson
6 The Great Man in War and Peace
7 War and Peace from the Military Point of View
8 Tolstoy and Clausewitz
Rick McPeak
pp. 111-122
9 The Awful Poetry of War
pp. 123-139
10 Tolstoy and Clausewitz
Andreas Herberg-Rothe
pp. 140-159
11 The Disobediences of War and Peace
Elizabeth D. Samet
pp. 160-174
12 Tolstoy the International Relations Theorist
David A. Welch
pp. 175-189
War and Peace at West Point
pp. 190-194
pp. 195-220
Works Cited
pp. 221-236
Contributors
pp. 237-238
pp. 239-246

Additional Information

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Science & Technology

Davis, California

Movies must avoid glorifying war and instead show the damage they do to humanity

Watching this violent film encouraged me to watch other war films as well. For a long time, I watched these movies just to see all the blood and the fighting.

I’m sure I’m not the only one to say that action films with a lot of violence can be very appealing. Before, I thought that the movie “The Thin Red Line” was bad just because I skipped through the whole movie and found that there were only two combat scenes. I read all the comments on YouTube and wondered why people thought it was such a good film.

So this got me thinking about a big question — what makes a war film “good?” I watched movies like “Platoon” and “Black Hawk Down,” and for a very long time, I felt that a good war movie just had to have advanced special effects to be as realistic as possible.

Despite the gut spilling and other realistic effects that made war seem absolutely miserable, these movies made me see war as this interesting setting to potentially take part in. They made war seem fun. For a long time, I had this fanciful image of what war was actually like. We’re not just talking about young kids playing war. Young and old can watch these movies with soldiers shooting down enemies and wonder, “Why can’t I do that?” That is why every year, tens of thousands of people meet up all over the country and reenact wars.

Ordinary people, from your barber to five-star generals, have a bloodthirsty desire to go to war and bomb other people. This is one of the untold consequences of portraying war in such a romanticized way — by focusing on the physical aspect of war and not its emotional toll.

The suffering of soldiers is often only shown through physical pain on the big screen. But in reality, a soldier may come home from a tour of duty in Iraq without a scratch but have a wrecked mental state after having absolutely horrifying experiences.

This is the part of warfare that movies largely do not display on the big screen. A movie with plenty of action scenes, big budgets and big-name actors is likely to make much more money than one that shows very little blood and only short combat scenes. These days, it seems that historical war films either need a lot of blood and guts or some type of love angle to get tens of millions of dollars in the box office.

That’s the problem that many movies have. They have to decide between portraying war in stark circumstances, making it too boring or off-putting for the average movie-goer, or make it like any other action movie and add plenty of gore and other special effects to keep the heart racing.

That’s not to say that all war movies out there are completely bad. Many films glorify war and make it seem honorable to die in battle while portraying it how it actually is — grim, disgusting, harrowing, mentally jarring and absolutely miserable. A realistic war film can have good special effects while also taking into account what war does to humanity. It’s very hard to show how war damages a person’s mental state. But it’s not impossible.

Oliver Stone wrote the film “Platoon,” which was based upon his own experiences as a soldier in Vietnam. One of the most striking scenes in that film comes when the soldiers burn down a Vietnamese village. The horror and disgust on the soldiers’ faces about what they just did hint at the regret of doing such a horrible thing. Death is just one side to war. The audience didn’t have to see the suffering of the civilians to know how they felt about it.

At times, the film does glorify war, especially with the combat scenes and the Rambo-like behavior of Charlie Sheen’s character. But this film did a very good job demonstrating that war affects everyone and it’s an utter shame that people have to be put through it. Whether it be the soldier suffering from seeing his best friend die right in front of him or the mother who saw her child murdered by soldiers for no reason, the less “entertaining” parts of war have to be shown on the big screen.

I want to recommend two World War II films that are relatively unknown. The first one is an Italian film called “El Alamein,” named after a major battle in North Africa. The other is the 1993 German version of “Stalingrad,” named after the pivotal battle that changed the war. ( “El Alamein: In the Line of Fire” can be found on Youtube. The only video on Youtube with the entire “Stalingrad” 1993 film is Russian-dubbed, but has English subtitles.)

Two aspects help make these movies some of the most accurate depictions of war. Both of these films are shown from a losing perspective, something often unheard of in war films, because writers think the audience wants to see a winner. They are also written in contrasting, extreme physical climates — one in the sweltering heat of the Egyptian desert, the other in the freezing open plains of Russia.

Gunfire, blood and all the other special effects aren’t really needed to make a good war film. It’s possible for film developers to create a realistic narrative even with a low budget and bad special effects.

Written by: Justin Chau — [email protected]

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by individual columnists belong to the columnists alone and do not necessarily indicate the views and opinions held by The California Aggie.

1 Fighting Talk: Victorian War Poetry

Matthew Bevis is a University Lecturer and Fellow in English at Keble College, Oxford. His publications include Tennyson: Lives of Victorian Literary Figures (2003), The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (2007), Some Versions of Empson, ed. (2007), Comedy: A Very Short Introduction (2012), and Lessons in Byron (2013). He is currently co-editing a collection of essays on Edward Lear and The Play of Poetry and writing a book entitled Wordsworth’s Laughter.

Published: 18 September 2012
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This chapter examines Victorian war poetry and considers how its form as well as its content enacts a divided attitude to war. It studies poetic theory as well as practice, discussing the poetry of Browning, Arnold, Hopkins, Tennyson, Hardy, Housman, Kipling and others. The chapter also considers how the protean figure of the soldier comes of age in Victorian culture and poetry, and attempts to make a case for the complexity of nineteenth-century imaginings of war.

Victorian war poetry is often engaged in conflict with its own form, rather than with an external enemy. Browning's Dramatic Lyrics (1842) begins with a series of apparently belligerent ‘Cavalier Tunes’, but readers approach them armed with a note from the volume's advertisement. There the poet observes that most of the poems are ‘though for the most part Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine’. 1 ‘Cavalier’, then, may be a lyrical-dramatic pun: the soldier-singers are proud to be voicing their support for Charles I, but the poet who creates these voices asks us to consider whether they are themselves cavalier. A later poem in the collection, ‘Incident of the French Camp’, focuses on the potential consequences of such fighting talk. The speaker recalls a moment when Napoleon's army, pursuing the Austrians, stormed Ratisbon under the command of one of the Emperor's most renowned generals, Jean Lannes. Napoleon looks on:

Just as perhaps he mused ‘My plans That soar, to earth may fall Let once my army-leader Lannes Waver at yonder wall,’ Out 'twixt the battery-smokes there flew A rider, bound on bound Full-galloping; nor bridle drew Until he reached the mound. Then off there flung in smiling joy, And held himself erect By just his horse's mane, a boy: You hardly could suspect— (So tight he kept his lips compressed, Scarce any blood came through) You looked twice ere you saw his breast Was all but shot in two. 2

The enjambed lines in the first stanza work with the rider to accentuate his pace, but in the second they shift from stridency to hesitancy. We are asked to glance back even as we move forward. ‘And held himself erect’ initially sounds proud, but the next line, in telling us how he did so, comes as a shock (the ‘rider’ also becomes a more vulnerable ‘boy’). You ‘hardly could suspect’ him, this boy, ‘So tight he kept his lips compressed’ (a soldierly example to others of tight-lipped trustworthiness)—until, that is, you come to suspect something else as the sentence makes its inexorable progress. The penultimate line makes one last grasp at a dignified diction (‘ere’, ‘breast’) before the close of the stanza brings the incident into clearer focus. The poem ends when we are told that ‘the boy fell dead’; while Napoleon was dwelling on whether his plans might fall to earth, the poem was contemplating another kind of falling.

The Victorians are not often credited with an attentiveness to the realities of warfare. They have frequently been taken to task for keeping their own lips compressed and for refusing to dwell on the bloodier side of conflict. Their war-tunes have been heard as cavalier, and critical study has been focused instead on the rude awakenings of the twentieth century. Never such innocence again. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians , published in the final year of the Great War, marks the divide. Strachey's father had been a general in the army, but the son was a conscientious objector, and such objections can be heard in the icy briskness of his book's final sentence. Recalling how General Gordon's death in Khartoum was avenged by Kitchener's army at Omdurman in 1898, Strachey observes: ‘it had all ended very happily—in a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Evelyn Baring’. 3 This parody of a happy ending is meant as the final nail in the coffin of Victorian imperial confidence, and Strachey's view has held sway in subsequent literature. As Samuel Hynes observed more recently, the Great War ‘brought to an end the life and values of Victorian and Edwardian England’. 4

This general judgement has been echoed in appreciations of war poetry. As the First World War comes to be seen as heralding a break between Victorian and modern conceptions of conflict, so a series of neat poetic oppositions emerges—the glorious versus the gruesome, the heroic versus the hellish, the romantic versus the realistic. One need not deny the differences between writing before and after the First World War without feeling that such oppositions do a disservice to the complexities of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century war poetry, to the former in particular. Victorian war poetry has frequently been belittled or ignored by critics, usually by way of dismissive references to Tennyson serving as prelude to discussion of the poets of the Great War. 5 Even Malvern Van Wyk Smith, in what remains the only book-length study of the subject, confines himself to the Anglo-Boer War, and closes with the assertion that ‘after the Boer War, war poetry could no longer be merely a sub-department of patriotic verse’. 6 But war poetry was not ‘merely’ this before the Boer War. Such statements have not helped to generate interest in the subject. It is not given attention in essay collections, 7 and a recent study of Victorian war literature sidelines poetry on the grounds that ‘so much of it seems little more than a string of patriotic slogans’. 8 This sense of Victorian war poetry as a synonym for victorious war poetry needs to be reconsidered. Like the speaker in Browning's poem, whose responsible gaze insists on looking twice, Victorian poets often require us to see double.

In Fifteen Decisive Battles (1851), Edward Creasy noted that ‘It is an honourable characteristic of the Spirit of this Age, that projects of violence and warfare are regarded among civilized states with increasing aversion. … Yet it cannot be denied that a fearful and wonderful interest is attached to these scenes of carnage.’ 9 The interest was reflected in sales of Creasy's book (a Victorian best-seller, it was reprinted thirty-eight times before 1894). The ‘scenes’ were not merely historical; every year of Victoria's reign, her soldiers were fighting a series of ‘little wars’ in some part of the world. 10 The perplexed Victorian fascination with warfare is also evident in a group of phrases that, according to the OED , made their way into the language during the period. In addition to ‘war-footing’ (1847), ‘war-code’ (1853), ‘war-news’ (1857), and ‘war-machines’ (1881), the Dictionary cites a collection of words that ‘denote works of art, etc., of which the subject is war’: ‘war-ballad’ (1854), ‘war poem’ (1857), ‘war story’ (1864), ‘war pictures’ (1883), ‘war artist’ (1890), ‘war-plays’ (1896), ‘war films’ (1897). The interest in war did not preclude a critical engagement with it; even the advent of the Victoria Cross (the first medal in England to recognize acts of bravery independent of rank 11 ) raised some awkward questions. When Wilfred Owen snapped, ‘The Victoria Cross! I covet it not. Is it not Victorian ? yah! pah!’, 12 he was not the first to announce a refusal to be beguiled by that age's pageantry. On hearing the news of its introduction in 1855, Punch offered its own commentary by having two shivering soldiers on the frontline in the Crimea discuss the VC: ‘“Well, Jack! Here's good news from Home. We're to have a medal.” “That's very kind. Maybe one of these days we'll have a coat to stick it on?”’ 13

The unsettling aspects of war found their way into poetic theory and practice even as Victorian writers sought to distance themselves from the fray. In his inaugural lecture in the Oxford Poetry Chair in 1857, Matthew Arnold observed that one of the chief characteristics of ‘a modern age, of an age of advanced civilization, is the banishment of the ensigns of war and bloodshed from the intercourse of civil life. … Wars are still carried on; but within the limits of civil life a circle has been formed within which man can move securely, and develop the arts of peace uninterruptedly.’ 14 Accompanying this modern spirit is ‘the supreme characteristic of all: the intellectual maturity of man himself; the tendency to observe facts with a critical spirit’. 15 As an early example of such reflective, unwarlike modernity, Arnold cites Grecian society and its expressive flowering in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War . However, as Arnold continues, the ‘arts of peace’ are not allowed to remain uninterrupted:

In the case of Thucydides I called attention to the fact that his habit of mind, his mode of dealing with questions, were modern; that they were those of an enlightened, reflecting man among ourselves. … The predominance of thought, of reflection, in modern epochs is not without its penalties … it has produced a state of feeling unknown to the less enlightened but perhaps healthier epochs—the feeling of depression, the feeling of ennui . Depression and ennui ; these are the characteristics stamped on how many of the representative works of modern times! 16

This passage echoes Arnold's argument in his 1853 Preface, where modernity's reflective powers lead to the disabling ‘dialogue of the mind with itself’. 17 If the civilizing process paradoxically creates the conditions in which it may not be able to flourish, then those ‘ensigns of war’ are not quite banished, but become part of the warring psyche. War is not, then, what modern life avoids, but part of a description of what it embodies. ‘Dover Beach’ (1851) tries to form a circle within which man can move securely, outside the realm of war, yet from its opening this lyrical ‘art of peace’ is haunted by its demons as the speaker addresses his interlocutor: ‘On the French coast the light | Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand.’ 18 In the 1850s, this light was not only part of a picturesque scene, but also a glint of menace (as the invasion scares of that decade would show). The poem ends:

And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The source for this passage is Thucydides' description of the Battle of Epipolae in his History of the Peloponnesian War , where he recounts a night battle in which the Athenians became disoriented and came to blows with one another. The source that, for Arnold, was meant to enshrine ‘that noble serenity which always accompanies true insight’ 19 is harnessed here to express a sense of the modern mind's loss of bearings. The speaker's aim is to draw attention to a bower sheltering him and his beloved from the warring world outside, but ‘swept’ might refer to ‘we’ as well as to the ‘plain’. That is, the poem closes not just with the sense that ‘it's us against them’, but also with the more disturbing suggestion that the couple may be swept up in it all by being against each other. Like many Victorian lyrics, ‘Dover Beach’ is a war poem of sorts, not only because the threat of war hovers in and around its edges, but also because war is part of the fabric of its most intimate human imaginings.

The complex debt that Arnold owes to Thucydides bears on the question of the classical inheritance of Victorian war poetry. This inheritance has often been cited as another marker of the Victorian/modern divide. Victorian poetics is seen as responsive to an epic tradition that is said to endorse militaristic values, while twentieth-century war poetry is, as Matthew Campbell puts it, ‘a poetry which no longer feels that it can sing in celebration of arms and the man’. 20 There is some truth in this distinction, but it should also be noted that the celebrations of classical epic are themselves equivocal. When Arnold in his Preface advocated a return to the classical simplicity of the Greek tradition and style as an escape from the luxuriant disease of modernity, he prescribed an avoidance of ‘contemporary allusions’ and an emphasis on ‘action’ rather than on appeals to ‘our transient feelings and interests’. 21 The work that was meant to exemplify these critical principles was Sohrab and Rustum (1853), and—as many contemporary reviewers noted—the poem frequently borrowed from the structure and the style of the Iliad . Yet, Arnold's borrowings give voice not to a Homeric championing of war, but to that side of Homer that Simone Weil so sensitively described. Speaking of ‘those few luminous moments, scattered here and there throughout the poem’, Weil observes:

The tradition of hospitality persists, even through several generations, to dispel the blindness of combat. … [M]oments of grace are rare in the Iliad , but they are enough to make us feel with sharp regret what it is that violence has killed and will kill again … Whatever is not war, whatever war destroys or threatens, the Iliad wraps in poetry; the realities of war, never. 22

Weil notes that ‘the brief evocations of the world of peace are felt as pain’, 23 and these evocations are at the heart of Arnold's debt to Homer. When Rustum mortally wounds his son Sohrab, the latter lies dying and announces that he pities his mother for her loss. As Rustum listens, combat gives way to thoughts of hospitality:

he listened, plunged in thought: And his soul set to grief, as the vast tide Of the bright rocking Ocean sets to shore At the full moon; tears gathered in his eyes; For he remembered his early youth, And all its bounding rapture; as, at dawn, The shepherd from his mountain-lodge descries A far, bright city, smitten by the sun, Through many rolling clouds—so Rustum saw His youth; saw Sohrab's mother, in her bloom; And that old king, her father, who loved well His wandering guest, and gave him his fair child With joy; and all the pleasant life they led, They three, in that long-distant summer-time … 24

The first simile makes grief feel like a homecoming, as if grief itself were a source of rest to a mind that has for so long attempted to resist it. The second, in comparing the warrior to the shepherd, evokes a dream of the pastoral world in which the only thing that smites is the sun (‘smitten’ here, with its suggestion of being enamoured, serves to bathe martial action in romantic yearning). Both similes are lingering dreams—precarious digressions from the realization that awaits the father, forlorn attempts to stay the flow of the action, for it is action that has brought the losses Rustum contemplates. These similes are emblems of the luxuriant modern style that Arnold wished to avoid, and such luxuries (and the brooding which accompanies them) frequently punctuate Sohrab and Rustum , turning it into a ‘modern’ poem in its willingness to dwell on ‘the dialogue of the mind with itself’ that war can produce. Indeed, the setting of the poem (two armies of Eastern troops, the Tartars and the Persians, face each other on the plains of the Oxus) is not as remote from ‘contemporary allusions’ and ‘transient feelings and interests’ as Arnold might wish to suggest. As Isobel Armstrong notes: ‘what could be more modern than this? The historical context of Arnold's writing was the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the insecure status of Afghanistan and the new alignments of Britain, France and Russia, the nineteenth-century problem. The Crimean war was two years away, but the eastern question already cast shadows at the beginning of the 1850s.’ 25 Those shadows can be glimpsed in Sohrab and Rustum , a poem chastened by its own mixed allegiances, and enriched by its debt to a classical tradition that dwelt on the cost as well as the honour of war.

The fertile ambiguities of Arnold's principles and practice cast their own shadows across the writing of the period, and the Crimean War was not one of those contemporary events or transient interests that poets felt themselves at liberty to pass over. In many ways, the Crimean conflict was a new kind of war. It was the first time that commissioned war artists accompanied a British army into the field, and the first conflict of European military powers to be recorded by camera. These developments encouraged a verisimilitude in battle painting and other genres, fostering a shift from older heroic depictions to a more realistic portrayal of the battlefield. 26 The war was also the first to make use of the telegraph, and to call upon the art of the war correspondent (unlike those in the Great War, these correspondents were subject to very little censorship 27 ). William Howard Russell, correspondent for The Times , proclaimed: ‘The only thing the partisans of misrule can allege is that we don't “make things pleasant” to the authorities, and that, amid the filth and starvation and deadly stagnation of the camp, we did not go about “babbling of green fields”, of present abundance, and of prospects of victory.’ 28 Much of Russell's writing sets itself against babble, and reads like a description of the front line in the First World War: ‘the skies are black as ink—the wind is howling over the staggering tents—the trenches are turned into dykes … men are out for twelve hours at a time … not a soul seems to care for their comfort or even for their lives.’ 29

As both these quotations suggest, The Times was a forum for many criticisms that would later be echoed during the Great War (for two criticisms in particular: the mismanagement of the army by an incompetent aristocracy and the neglect of the rank-and-file by a corrupt officer class). Indeed, the war correspondents—described by one contemporary as ‘poetic writers of prose’ 30 —might be seen as England's first soldier-poets. In a note to his poem The Death-Ride: A Tale of the Light Brigade , Westland Marston observed: ‘the masterly Records of the War which now appear in our crowded journals—records which are at once histories and poems—leave to formal poetry only this task—to adopt their descriptions and to develop their suggestions; to comment, as it were, upon their glorious texts’. 31 These texts were ‘glorious’ because they attended to something more than glory, and poets who adopted and developed newspaper copy were responding to a form of expression that questioned heroic conceptions of war even as it acknowledged a regard for their enduring value. Nowhere is this development more apparent than in the responses of Russell and Tennyson to one of the most renowned military blunders of the period, the charge of the Light Brigade. 32

T. S. Eliot once praised Herbert Read's war poetry as ‘neither Romance nor Reporting … it has emotion as well as a version of things seen’. 33 The first sentence of Russell's report on the charge of the Light Brigade treads a fine line between romance and reporting: ‘If the exhibition of the most brilliant valour, of the excess of courage, and of a daring which would have reflected lustre on the best days of chivalry can afford full consolation for the disaster today, we can have no reason to regret the melancholy loss which we sustained in a contest with a savage and barbarian enemy.’ 34 The ‘If’ announces that this romantic vocabulary is under pressure; an ‘excess’ of courage is not only courage, but also foolhardiness, and the progress of the sentence gives readers reasons to feel unconsoled (one might not regret a ‘loss’, but it is harder not to regret a ‘ melancholy loss’). Tennyson famously adapted Times reports when composing ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, but he kept their dual depiction of war as both ennobling and horrifying. As Trudi Tate has recently suggested, although ‘often regarded as a simple-minded piece of patriotism’, the poem ‘is in fact a subtle and even anguished reflection upon the Crimean war’. 35 Around the time of composition, the poet admitted that, despite his official position as Victoria's Laureate, he was unable to sympathize ‘at this hour with any song of triumph when my heart almost bursts with indignation at the accursed mismanagement of our noble little army, that flower of men’. 36 This indignation can be glimpsed in his poem:

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’ Was there a man dismayed? Not though the soldier knew Some one had blundered: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die: Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred. When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made! All the world wondered. Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred. 37

The soldiers made a charge, not a reply, and Tennyson's poem, as if to make some form of reparation, does the opposite. The soldiers followed orders and asked no questions; the poem gives orders and poses questions (‘Was there a man dismayed?’ does not quite manage to be rhetorical). Part of its strength comes from the way in which Tennyson does not make the soldiers' suffering feel like a mere inevitability (‘Some one had blundered’), even though it acknowledges that the men had no choice (‘Theirs but to do and die’). The poem is at once drawn to honour the sacrifice they made and angered by the necessity of having to honour this event at all, hence the reference to the ‘wild’ charge, which is similar to Russell's ‘excess of courage’ (somewhere between a rebuke and a compliment), before the adjective is dropped a couple of lines later for the sake of good form. Contra Wilfred Owen, this war poetry does not reside ‘in the pity’, for Tennyson is aware that to invite only pity may be to invite complacency. Rather, when we are told to ‘honour’ the Light Brigade, the imperative signals not only the need for remembrance, but also for an answering action (to ‘honour’ as one would honour a debt).

The poem is one such action, and honours the men by refusing to stay silent about blunders. The piece was built on an adaptation of The Times report, which had referred to ‘some hideous blunder’; Tennyson reshaped it to ‘Some one had blundered’ and explained that ‘the line kept running in my head, and I kept saying it over and over till it shaped itself into the burden of the poem’. 38 This ‘burden’—meaning both ‘that which is borne’ and ‘the refrain or chorus of a song’ ( OED )—weighs heavy on the poem, for so insistent was this sound, and this military error, that the Laureate rhymed it with words that deviated from the Queen's English (according to Tennyson's friend, W. F. Rawnsley, ‘hundred’ is pronounced ‘hunderd’ in Lincolnshire). 39 What we hear in these sounds, and in sounds that drum through the poem (‘thund ered ’, ‘soldi er ’, ‘sab re s’, ‘gunn er s’, ‘shatt ered ’, ‘sund ered ’), is a ghost of the words ‘err’ and ‘erred’. These whispers are the poem's burden, words uttered under its breath, and echoed again in the line ‘All the world wondered’, where ‘wondered’ condenses the poem's mix of awestruck admiration and perplexed incredulity. It also carries within it the sound of the poem's pride for the men alongside its awareness of the pointlessness of their death (‘won’, ‘erred’). An exemplary Victorian war poem, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ sounds war's heroism, but it also sounds it out. In doing so, the poem demands an admiring spectatorship even as it remains wary of turning war into a spectator sport.

The progress of the Crimean War was marked by much poetry that sang of arms and the man in a less equivocal fashion—Gerald Massey's War Waits (1855) and James Friswell's anthology Songs of the War , both of which emphasized ‘that fund of patriotism which is the safeguard of any kingdom, however mismanaged or misgoverned’. 40 Yet many poets who supported the war were intent on highlighting the messiness of the business: Martin Tupper's ‘The Van and the Rear’ begins ‘Brilliant troops in proud array, | Thrilling trumpets, rattling drums’, before the rear quickly makes itself heard in the next stanza: ‘Mangled wretches, horrors dire, | Groans and curses, wounds and woes.’ 41 Moreover, writers who opposed the war were raising their voices in collections like Ernest Jones's The Battle-Day and Other Poems (1855), Alexander Smith and Sydney Dobell's Sonnets on the War (1855), and Dobell's England in Time of War (1856). Even The Times , so often critical of the war, grew impatient with these poetic developments: ‘Aeschylus fought at Marathon, Milton was the secretary of Cromwell, Goethe a minister of state. Instead of this, what have we now? Poets hiding themselves in holes and corners.’ 42 This comment is from a review of one of the most important war collections of the period, Tennyson's first volume of poetry since taking up the mantle of Poet Laureate, Maud and Other Poems (1855).

The OED 's earliest example of the term ‘war poem’ is a reference to Maud . The example comes from a letter by John Addington Symonds in which he recalled a lecture he attended: ‘[The speaker] chiefly talked about the two Lushingtons & Maud which he considers a true war poem & praises highly.’ 43 ‘True’ hints at a debate over values, and the volumes of Henry and Franklin Lushington (friends of Tennyson) offer one side of the argument. In their work, the war poem is an incitement to decisive action: ‘For a moment, dearly as we love him, let Hamlet stand aside: he has but too much to say in Germany: we want Fortinbras just now.’ 44 Such positions echoed the views of Carlyle, who in his lecture on ‘The Hero as Poet’ (1841) had explained that ‘the Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too.’ 45 Tennyson was frequently drawn to this classical model of the poet-warrior, and to a conception of poetry as a form of martial action; as he observed in his Epilogue to The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava , ‘The song that nerves a nation's heart | Is in itself adeed.’ 46 Likewise, the speaker of his monodrama takes up Fortinbras's tone when he feels able; Maud opens with the protagonist calling for ‘loud war by land and sea’ (I. i. 47), 47 echoes language and arguments from poems by the Lushingtons and other pro-war collections (war as antidote to domestic commercial greed, as heroic endeavour, as Christian crusade), and ends when he signs up for the army.

Yet Tennyson was not content to ‘let Hamlet stand aside’. He saw Maud as ‘akin to Hamlet ’, 48 and although the poem's speaker talks a good fight, he also expresses a need to escape the fighting talk: ‘let a passionless peace be my lot, | Far-off from the clamour of liars belied in the hubbub of lies’ (I. iv. 151–2). The poem does not merely reiterate the views of the Lushingtons and the pro-war contingent; it frames them in a dramatic form that asks readers to consider the paucity of the ‘clamour’ alongside the probity of the speaker's own chatter. Indeed, the speaker's longing for a critical distance often leads him towards a pointed critical engagement. When, gazing down on a nearby village, he mutters to himself that ‘Jack on his ale-house bench has as many lies as a Czar’ (I. iv. 110), he draws a comparison between a member of the British public and a Russian leader with whom that public was at war. Nicholas I was widely condemned in the British press as a liar because of his claim to be fighting a holy war, not a war of aggression. But the same might be said of the speaker's homeland: the pretext for the war was that Britain was protecting the rights of the Greek Christians in Turkey against Russian invasion; the subtext was that Turkey was a key strategic location for Britain's imperial commercial holdings in the East. 49 As a speaker in Blackwood's remarked: ‘Above all, let us eschew cant in giving our reasons for the war. We go to war because Russia is becoming too powerful.’ 50 War insists upon differentiation, but Maud is also listening out for discomforting alliances.

Tennyson's little Hamlet is a ‘true’ Victorian war poem because it acknowledges and explores the warring claims that make the speaker's own pronouncements part of the viewpoint he criticizes. When he comes across Maud singing ‘a passionate ballad … a martial song’ (I. v. 165–6), he hears her

Singing of men that in battle array, Ready in heart and ready in hand March with banner and bugle and fife To the death, for their native land. (I. v. 169–72)

Their land, not our land. The accents of Fortinbras are overheard by an alienated listener, who then begs ‘silence, beautiful voice’, for ‘you only trouble the mind | With a joy in which I cannot rejoice, | A glory I shall not find’ (I. v. 180–3). This moment encapsulates the predicament and the achievement of the most enduring Victorian war poetry—a speaker drawn to, yet distrustful of, martial fervour, who aspires to be included in the battle march, yet senses the limits of its rhythms (hence the rich tonal ambiguity of ‘I shall not find’, which sounds at once envious, lonely, critical, and proud). What he finds instead, and what we find through him in the poem's feverish repetitions and echoes, is a disturbing confluence of the language that explores his romantic engagement with Maud with that which charts his public engagement with the war (the name ‘Maud’ itself means ‘war’ or ‘battle’). Erotic and martial vocabularies frequently overlap, as in the polysemic nature of ‘dying’, so that we begin to see the speaker's love for Maud as a kind of death-wish, and his final willingness to ‘die’ for his country not only as an ennobling sacrifice for a cause, but also as a desperate attempt to conduct a courtship by other means. The first glimmer of the speaker's love-in-madness comes in the poem's second line when he tells us of the lips of the hollow ‘dabbled with blood-red heath’ (I. i. 2); at the end of the poem, when he talks of the ‘blood-red blossom of war’ (III. vi. 53), we sense that he is still seeing red. Maud 's final lines contain a strangely enervated music even though the speaker agrees to march to the death. ‘Their native land’ becomes ‘my native land’:

We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still, And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind; It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill; I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind, I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned. (III. v. 55–9)

‘We have hearts in a cause’ might sound both full- and half-hearted (‘a cause’ is finally something he can stand for, yet ‘a’ cause, not ‘the’ cause, suggests that any cause will do). During the 1850s and 1860s attention was turning towards enlistment, and, as one official report noted, ‘few enlist from any real inclination for military life. … Enlistment is, for the most part, occasioned by want of work—by pecuniary embarrassment—by family quarrels—or by any other difficulties of a private nature.’ 51 The private difficulties and embarrassments of Maud 's speaker are occasion for the poem's ending. What we are observing is the progress from private grief to civic responsibility, and—more disturbingly—a link between a patriotic fervour and a pathological fever, and the rhymes in the stanza provide insight into the mental status of a speaker in favour of war at all costs: ‘still/ill’. Contemporary reviewers disagreed about what position Tennyson was taking in Maud , some arguing that the Laureate was for the Peace Party since he allowed a madman to speak in defence of war, others insisting that the war passages were evidence of his support of England's involvement in the Crimea. 52 But Tennyson's dramatic form is investigating positions, not taking them. His poem is an echo of a war-cry, an echo of questionable fidelity that provokes rather than distils thought.

Maud 's ghost, and the ghost of the Crimean conflict, haunted collections of Victorian poetry after the war. In The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems (1858), William Morris set himself to challenge traditional conceptions of chivalry by mingling a focus on warlike emblems with an attentiveness to another kind of detail. ‘Concerning Geffray Teste Noir’, for example, begins with a speaker recalling ‘The dancing trumpet sound, and we went forth; | And my red lion on the spear-head flapped’, but its progression marks a shift from collective battle charges to isolated waverings, as the earlier excitement of those repeated ‘and’s turns sour:

And I, being faint with smelling the burnt bones, And very hot with fighting down the street, And sick of such a life, fell down, with groans My head went weakly nodding to my feet. 53

The journey from the spear-head to the weakly nodding head is one which has taken account of the publicized horrors of the Crimean War. Similarly, in Morris's ‘The Wind’, his old knight's romantic reminiscences are interrupted when ‘in march'd the ghosts of those that had gone to the war’:

I knew them by the arms that I was used to paint Upon their long thin shields; but the colours were all grown faint, And faint upon their banner was Olaf, king and saint. 54

To recognize the soldiers by the emblems on their shields might imply that their physical injuries render them unrecognizable, as the men carry the scars of battle with them into the world beyond. These dead do not rest easy with their sacrifice, and their march heralds not a glorious remembrance, but a kind of beleaguered trooping of the colours. George Meredith's ‘Grandfather Bridgeman’, which he deemed important enough to stand at the head of his collection Modern Love (1862), contains a similar sense of fading splendour. A grandfather reads a letter from his soldier-grandson in the Crimea, lauding his victories and turning to the assembled family to note, ‘You'll own war isn't such humbug: and Glory means something, you see’. 55 What they eventually see, though, is another ghost; the letter turns out to be several weeks old, and Tom has been severely wounded during the interim. At the end of the poem he makes his entrance: ‘Wheeled, pale, in a chair, and shattered, the wreck of their hero was seen; | The ghost of Tom drawn slow o'er the orchard's shadowy green.’ This shattering, at once physical and emotional, frequently makes itself felt in post-Crimean War poetry, as touchable ghosts hover in the margins of the verse to remind readers of how war might re-figure and disfigure the body.

Beyond the Crimean War lay the Indian Mutiny, an event that further tested Victorian confidence in its imperial project and the violence that accompanied it. As Gautam Chakravarty has noted, the poetry of the Mutiny (unlike novelistic or historical explorations) tended to excise the sequence of causes that led to the popular insurgency and to focus instead on the sufferings of the British. 56 This focus again took its bearings from the press. The Cawnpore massacre was covered by The Times in leaders which dwelt on war-torn bodies with unprecedented directness:

The women having been stripped naked, beheaded and thrown into a well; the children having been hurled down alive upon the butchered mothers, whose blood yet reeked on their mangled bodies. … Children have been compelled to eat the quivering flesh of their murdered parents, after which they were literally torn asunder by the laughing fiends who surrounded them. 57

Victorian war poets have been accused of being irresponsibly squeamish about the effects of conflict, yet many poets who responded to the Indian Mutiny could be charged with not being squeamish enough, for their use of the press reports led to poems in which salacious detail served only as an excuse for hysterical cries of retribution. Mary E. Leslie borrowed The Times 's gratuitous ‘quivering’ when drawing attention to ‘a common grave | Heaped high with quivering, crushed humanity’, 58 while Martin Tupper's poems dwelt on atrocity in order to countenance an equally violent revenge: ‘Who pulls about the mercy?—the agonized wail of babies hewn piecemeal yet sickens the air.’ 59 Even before the Cawnpore incident, John Nicholson had suggested ‘a Bill for the flaying alive, impalement, or burning of the murderers of the women and children at Delhi’. After the atrocities, the tone became even more vindictive, and, as one historian has pointed out, ‘the Cawnpore massacre gave sanction to a retributive savagery which is one of the most shameful episodes in British history’. 60 The sanction was upheld by poems like Leslie's and Tupper's, although there were other voices that resisted this kind of grimly gleeful baiting. Christina Rossetti's ‘In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857’, as its title implies, tries to get close to the action and dates itself journalistically; yet, after an initial reference to how ‘The swarming howling wretches below | Gained and gained and gained’, 61 the focus turns to the last moments of the Skene family inside the tower as they decide to take their own lives rather than die at the hands of the mutineers. The emphasis is on the creation of a desperate dignity, rather than the incitement of a bloodthirsty revenge. Indeed, Rossetti kept the poem in the volume even after she found out that Captain Skene and his wife were actually captured and killed by the sword. 62 The violence of the Mutiny is also handled with sensitivity in Tennyson's first volume of Idylls of the King (1859), a collection which sold more than any previous volume of his work, and which dwelt on how imperial aggression might be seen as both the model and the catalyst for the violence it deplored in its colonies. 63

Tennyson has frequently been cited as the formative influence on a late Victorian hymning of empire, but the continuation of his Idylls of the King leads to poems that stage within themselves imperial anxieties as Arthur's rule is subjected to searching questions. Herbert Tucker has recently observed that ‘saddest of all Victorian epics, the Idylls in their gloomy analytic coherence shadow with equal plangency the losses that empire exacts and the downfall that awaits it’. 64 This plangency can be sensed in ‘The Last Tournament’ (1871), in which Arthur's imperial project meets with an imperious disobedience; the King insists that his knights do not seek revenge for a mutinous uprising, but they disobey his orders. Looking to the East, the horrors of the Indian Mutiny are recalled; only now it is the imperial state's violence that is given prominence:

[they] roared And shouted and leapt down upon the fallen; There trampled out his face from being known, And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves: Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang Through open doors, and swording right and left Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurled The tables over and the wines, and slew Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells, And all the pavement streamed with massacre: Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower, Which half that autumn night, like the live North, Red-pulsing up through Alioth and Alcor, Made all above it, and a hundred meres About it, as the water Moab saw Come round by the East, and out beyond them flushed The long low dune, and lazy-plunging sea. So all the ways were safe from shore to shore, But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord. 65

The sprawling first sentence insists on showing us what Victoria's little wars might involve. The breathless pace of the violence, accentuated by verbs at the end of run-on lines (‘sprang’, ‘hurled’, ‘slew’, ‘saw’, ‘flushed’), is matched by its savagery. Like the other verbs, we initially expect ‘slew’ to be transitive, but the grammatical shock as we veer into the next line gives gruesome voice to the indiscriminate nature of the killing. What we are asked to dwell on, though, is the monosyllabic drag of the last two lines, isolated on the page, for it is here where imperial supremacy counts the cost of the safety it creates. The callous efficiency of ‘So’ is almost parodic (‘so they all lived happily ever after’), before the ‘But’ records a heartbeat that has become distempered by the order it has established.

Timothy Lovelace has recently attended to Tennyson's meditations on the double-edged nature of battle wrath (both its honourable and its destructive potential), and noted that ‘the glories of battle often appear on the perimeters of Tennyson's pictures, his center of focus is usually rusting swords, vales of bones, or failing kingdoms’. 66 This focus was to become an increasingly central aspect of late Victorian poetry, as the glories of battle gave way to a more sustained look at the complex figure of the soldier. Often labelled as a career for malcontents or misfits, soldiering had a long history of stigma. Pay and conditions were very poor, and the iniquity of the purchase system was one of many reflections of class prejudice operating at all levels of the military life. 67 Wellington referred to his men at Waterloo as ‘the scum of the earth’, and the rank-and-file were frequently associated with alcoholism and sexual licentiousness (brothels provided cheap spirits; by 1862, a third of home-based troops were hospitalized on account of venereal disease 68 ). At mid-century, Robert MacDonald recalled his experience as a recruiter: ‘it was only in the haunts of dissipation or inebriation, and among the lowest dregs of society, that I met with anything like success’. 69

After the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, the dregs were invested with a new dignity. An enthusiastic reporter for The Times noted: ‘Any hostility which may have existed in bygone days towards the army has long since passed away. The red coat of the soldier is honoured throughout the country.’ 70 This is overpitched, but it highlights a shift. Samuel Smiles honoured the redcoat in his own way by ending Self-Help (1859) with examples of the soldier as ‘the true gentleman’, referring to the rank-and-file as ‘rough, gallant fellows’ and pointing out that in the war and the Mutiny ‘even the common soldiers proved themselves gentlemen under their trials’. 71 Smiles's vocabulary hovers between old and new conceptions of the soldier, but his sense of the figure's ‘trials’ was shared by many, and growing calls for army reform and improvement of the soldier's lot culminated in the abolishment of the purchase system in 1871. These revaluations found their way into poetry; Francis Hastings Doyle, who in 1867 succeeded Arnold as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, wrote a number of poems on the nameless men who fought in Victoria's name, and his ‘The Private of the Buffs’, like many other pieces, focused on the soldier as an individual, rather than as part of a collective—‘poor, reckless, rude, low-born, untaught, | Bewildered, and alone’. 72 Like Smiles's ‘rough gallant’, this ‘low-born’ but ‘untaught’ hero came to stand as a kind of synecdoche for war itself: savage yet chivalric, uncivilized yet the defender of civilization.

These developments intersected with the proselytizing tenor of British imperial rhetoric as Christian militarism captured the public imagination and helped to produce a new kind of soldier-hero. 73 Embracing the purpose of God and the doom assigned became a recurring feature of the poetry of soldiering. Military adventure was fused with religious narratives, and prominent figures like Havelock and Gordon came to embody a cluster of virtues with roots in nineteenth-century evangelical imperialism. 74 This diverse range of vocabularies (soldier as degenerate malcontent, as stoic victim, as Christian hero) permeates Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnet ‘The Soldier’ (1885). It begins by asking, ‘Yes. Why do we all, seeing of a soldier, bless him? Bless | Our redcoats, our tars? Both these being, the greater part, | But frail clay, nay but foul clay.’ 75 The move from ‘frail’ to ‘foul’ is a gesture to earlier conceptions of the soldier, but the answering voice is swift:

Mark Christ our King. He knows war, served this soldiering through; He of all can reave a rope best. There he bides in bliss Now, and seeing somewhere some man do all that man can do, For love he leans forth, needs his neck must fall on, kiss, And cry ‘O Christ-done deed! So God-made-flesh does too: Were I come o'er again′ cries Christ ‘it should be this.’

To envisage life as a form of ‘war’ and ‘soldiering’, and the job as a representation of ‘all that man can do’, is to see the soldier as both Everyman and Christ-like martyr. The act of soldiering on is accorded a transcendental dignity, for the soldier's death (hinted at in talk of a ‘rope’ and ‘his neck’) now intimates resurrection. The journey of ‘foul clay’ in this sonnet is the rite of passage of the soldier in Victoria's reign: from dens of prostitution to stages of pilgrimage, from inebriation to incarnation.

The century's closing decades witnessed a different kind of soldierly apotheosis, one of the most enduring bequests from Victorian poets to twentieth-century writers. When Rudyard Kipling's soldier in ‘The Instructor’ notes that ‘ There's one above is greater than us all ’, 76 he is referring not to God, but to the bullet that flies just above his crouching body. This war poetry breathes a different air; the soldier is no longer, technically speaking, a redcoat (Hopkins's poem was written in the last year that red coats were worn in battle), 77 but wears khaki for protective colouration. The soldier comes of age in Victorian poetry and culture as the methods of warfare themselves reach a terrifying maturity, and the figure now enjoys a new kind of privilege as he completes the metamorphosis from scapegoat to underdog. This focus on the soldier was due again, in part, to the progress of the newspapers and to the public's hunger for news of war in particular (between 1880 and 1900 the number of newspapers doubled, and during the Franco-Prussian War alone the circulation of the Daily News trebled). As one correspondent recalled, the demand for war reports was also a demand for news of the ‘sweating, swearing, grimy, dirty, fearless and generous Tommy’. 78

Tommy Atkins was heard as well as seen. The Victorian music-halls were, as J. A. Hobson argued in The Psychology of Jingoism , ‘a very serviceable engine for generating military passion’; 79 but they were also a space in which imperial jingoism and the official line on war might be questioned. The term ‘jingoism’ was the outgrowth of a popular music-hall song by G. W. Hunt (sung by G. H. Macdermott) from 1878, the chorus of which ran:

We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do, We've got the ships, we've got the men, and got the money too. We've fought the bear before, and while we're Britons true, The Russians shall not have Constantinople. 80

Voices like this were common, but recent work on the music-hall has pointed to other tones that need to be heard alongside them in order to appreciate the complexity of late Victorian imaginings of war. Macdermott's rival, Herbert Campbell, often performed another song on the same bill, this one written by Henry Pettit, with the chorus:

I don't want to fight, I'll be slaughtered if I do! I'll change my togs and sell my kit and pop my rifle too! I don't like the war, I ain't no Briton true And I'd let the Russians have Constantinople. 81

This emphasis on the ‘I’ lurking inside the ‘We’, and on a man who insists on being representative only of feelings of isolation, can be heard in different ways. Steve Attridge suggests that this speaker gave audiences a chance to laugh at the unwilling recruit, thereby offering ‘tangential support for the strident imperial tone of Macdermott's act’; 82 but he might also be heard as a spokesman for the disaffected, a man who has the courage to say what others are thinking, and who questions a military ethos even as he feels compelled to submit to it. 83 Late Victorian war songs often manage to combine a sense of the ‘we’ and the ‘I’; they have something of the swagger of military marches, but the burdens of their refrains start to feel like solitary whistlings in the dark as the century nears its close. The soldier's pluck was no longer to be condescended to as a reason to avoid his disconsolate pleadings. J. B. Booth acknowledged the significance of these voices when he observed: ‘Tommy moaned all through his sing-songs.’ 84

The most accomplished translation of Tommy's moaning into metre was effected by Kipling, and for more than thirty years after its publication his Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses (1892) was the most popular book of verse in the English-speaking world. Not against war, but against complacency about what war entails, his dramatic monologues took their lead from the music-hall to breathe new life into Atkins. Situating himself between wholly dignified and derogatory vocabularies, his ‘Tommy’ insisted: ‘We aren't no thin red ‘eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too | But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you.’ 85 One contemporary anthologist summed up the remarkable Tommy as ‘humanly full of discontent and grievance, with no more love than stay-at-home folk for blistering marches and an empty belly, fonder of life than most, he is a great and honourable fighter, gay in the face of a soldier's death, and a broad humorist in time of peril’, before noting that ‘Kipling handles honour and glory with no hint of awe’. 86 Kipling was responsibly wary of awe, of the way it can act as a refusal to dwell on what honour and glory can cost its recipient, but he was also cognizant of how the ‘broad humorist’ might offer a certain kind of disingenuous consolation, whereby the soldier becomes a mere clown, somebody whose joking might deflect attention from his suffering or lead some to reflect that he exists solely for their entertainment. Accordingly, his Tommies have a rueful wit, a trench humour that is burdened by an awareness of what war can inflict even as it refuses to bow under the strain of that burden. This tone is frequently heard in the soldiers' chorus, where the traditional sense of the form as a collective utterance is permeated by a dissentient isolation, an elegiac moan that runs through the sing-song. In ‘That Day’ (1895), for instance, the chorus becomes a form of torment:

Now there ain't no chorus ‘ere to give , Nor there ain't no band to play; An' I wish I was dead’ fore I done what I did , Or seen what I seed that day! 87

Daniel Karlin has astutely observed that ‘solidarity with one's kind is the most precious gift in Kipling's world. … But Kipling's emblem is the Cat that Walked by Himself.’ 88 Kipling's soldier is awkwardly positioned between solitude and solidarity. Very much his own man, yet also fearful of betraying or dishonouring his comrades, he frequently speaks with regret about what collective endeavour might encourage in war, even as he acknowledges the longing for community that war creates. These divided impulses are heard here, in a chorus that laments the lack of a chorus, and in lines that express both a loneliness and a need to be alone.

Kipling's poems often bring into prominence a particular strength of Victorian war poetry: a desire to dispel illusions, alongside an attempt to keep disillusion at bay. One means of effecting such a balance is through the double-jointed nature of the dramatic monologue, which allows us to sense another kind of eloquence and viewpoint operating behind the speaker. ‘The Young British Soldier’ is a characteristic example of Kipling's dexterity; spoken by an old soldier to a new recruit going out to India, the poem ends:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, So-oldier of the Queen! 89

On the one hand, Kipling's ingenuity with accent helps to accentuate the old man's uncompromising perspective. ‘Jest roll’ turns ‘just’ into ‘jest’, as if to suggest that in this arena justice has become a joke, while ‘your Gawd’ whittles down heavenly comfort by pairing a local pronunciation with a disturbingly localized pronoun—‘ your Gawd’ seems oddly uncollaborative (even question begging) at such a crucial juncture. On the other hand, the poet's craft hints at the limits of this perspective: ‘ so-old ier’ drags it out of him, for ‘so old’ is this soldier that his scepticism about war has degenerated into a luxurious cynicism, as instanced by the first word of the stanza: ‘When’ should read ‘If’ (after all, this speaker has survived). The silent young auditor of this dramatic monologue might be forgiven for feeling that the experienced old-timer is parading his worldliness, showing off while showing him the ropes.

The imperative to ‘go like a soldier’ also manages to hover between a sardonic and an ennobling tone. The speaker can be heard as a disillusioned commentator here, drawing attention to how a soldier's dying for his country is often an expedient, messy suicide. In contrast to a classical emphasis on the importance of a proper burial, we are left lingering on ‘remains’, a gruesome decaying from verb to noun. Yet, Kipling's form contains within it another sound: the thrice-repeated ‘Go, go, go like a soldier’ (itself containing a set of three) might also be heard as a dignified burial ritual of sorts, the repetitions aligning themselves with the three volleys traditionally fired over a soldier's grave by his comrades. And that final metrical swooping on ‘ of ’ is a commitment to the pride of belonging. Like so many of Kipling's war poems, the speaker's very insistence on keeping a stiff upper lip is what lends the piece its air of vulnerability. Such richly compounded accents bespeak a poetic fighting talk that, although it may include patriotic and militaristic zeal, also moves beyond it.

Kipling was an important influence on war poetry of the 1890s, although many poets tended to take their cue from his general defences of the Empire, rather than from the more provocative insinuations of his soldier-speakers. 90 The 1890s saw the publication of more anthologies of popular war poetry than any previous decade, and much of the writing in these collections does not ring true to the complex achievements of the age. 91 Henry Newbolt's ‘Vitaï Lampada’ was much anthologized, and its refrain, ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’ 92 is representative of the kind of imperial tub thumping that spoke of war as a public school cricket match in the colonies: ‘There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night—| Ten to make and the match to win—.’ Yet despite this ‘breathless hush’ and the aspiration towards indefatigable grandeur in the refrain, there is something disconcertingly shrill in the tone of this poem and others like it, as if the poet doth protest too much about the nobility and gentlemanliness of war. At the beginning of the new century the Edinburgh Review looked back over the Victorian period and suggested that recent attempts to glorify war were actually reactionary responses to a much more widespread phenomenon in poetry and culture: an increasingly modern nervousness about how and whether war could be justified. Questioning a ‘forcible-feeble kind’ of war poetry, and contrasting the present time with ‘a hundred years ago [when] poets were satisfied with the simple motive of their country's triumph’, the reviewer explained that there was now a desire to search for the grounds of war:

This is perhaps one of many signs of an increasing contradiction between the fact of war and the conscience of civilized humanity. … The actual vision of battle does not seem to inspire poetry. … The poet who devotes himself to celebrate acts of war, although his art may be redeemed if he can reveal the soul of good in things evil, does nevertheless choose a lower region when he might inhabit a higher. 93

This higher region is what many Victorian poets had been trying to inhabit for some time, a poetic domain in which an ‘actual vision of battle’ is complemented by an attentiveness to what occurs in and around the battle's edges, and in which celebration is complicated by meditation. This reviewer was writing when ‘the fact of war’ was highly prominent; the Boer War (the longest, bloodiest, and most expensive war ever fought by the Victorian army) had just ended, and had given rise to unprecedented modern ‘evils’—civilian casualties, guerrilla warfare, and concentration camps. 94

The ‘forcible-feeble’ brigade was quick to support the war. Swinburne's sonnet ‘The Transvaal’ was published in The Times a day after war was declared, and ended with the cry: ‘Strike, England, and strike home.’ 95 William Ernest Henley followed suit; the first poem in his next collection, ‘Remonstrance’, borrowed Swinburne's line for its own ending. 96 But this line contains within it an unwitting pun as if in remonstration (to ‘strike home’ may also be to strike at home), and other writers were increasingly drawing attention to the way in which a tyrannical militarism abroad was not only at odds with how modern liberal Britain wished to perceive itself, but also an emblem of the true state of the country. 97 W. H. Colby accordingly took Swinburne's line in another direction in his poetic contribution to the debate: ‘Where are the dogs agape with jaws afoam? | Where are the wolves? Look, England, look at home.’ 98 The emphasis on the material and moral damage inflicted upon those who waged and won wars (as well as upon those who lost them) was pronounced. As Van Wyk Smith notes, ‘opponents of war managed to put their case more volubly, more insistently, and to a much larger Audience … than in any previous war’. 99 This is undoubtedly true, but two of the most distinguished war poets of the late Victorian period (Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman) were intent on forging a tone that expressed something other than voluble insistence. When Hardy complained that bellicose war poetry tended to ‘throw into the shade works that breathe a more quiet and philosophic spirit’, 100 he was not defending anything as simplistic as ‘anti-war poetry’. Rather, he was defending the need for another kind of accent in poetry about war. When poems against war themselves take on a warring tone (Colby's lines above are an example of this; his poetic questions are merely rhetorical), they might be said to become part of the problem they anatomize. Hardy and Housman were more circumspect about the seductive pull of fighting talk, and were aware of the ease with which it could generate an oppositional voice that was implicated in the stridency it condemned.

Hardy's war poetry takes another kind of breath; in his poems one feels that marching rhythms might at any time be given their marching orders. In ‘Embarcation’, the first in his series of ‘War Poems’ to be included in Poems of the Past and Present (1901), we learn that ‘deckward tramp the bands’. 101 ‘Tramp’, not‘march’—even the soldiers seem unable to pick up their feet, and Hardy's metrical feet frequently display a similar recalcitrance. An article in the Quarterly Review in 1900 noted that patriotic poetry had been changing its tune. From Tennyson onwards, Victorian poetry ‘has, perhaps, here and there a somewhat uncertain sound, as though feeling its way … the patriotic fervour of our forefathers, is exchanged for a limping jolt’. 102 This uncertain sound resonates throughout Hardy's work. Rather than absorbing themselves in battle, his war poems tend to dwell on scenes of anticipation or aftermath, either gathering a kind of reluctant breath for what is to come or stuttering over a past that refuses to go away. Take the close of ‘The Man He Killed’ (1902), where a soldier dwells on the whys and wherefores of battle:

‘I shot him dead because— Because he was my foe, Just so: my foe of course he was; That's clear enough; although ‘He thought he'd’list, perhaps, Off-hand like—just as I— Was out of work—had sold his traps— No other reason why. ‘Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down You'd treat if met where any bar is, Or help to half-a-crown.’ 103

Class solidarity across a national divide is part of what makes war, rather than the ‘foe’, feel like the enemy here. Despite the speaker's awareness of division, the internal and terminal rhymes in the first stanza (‘because/because/he was/he was’, and ‘foe/so/foe/although’) give voice to a will that strives to locate its identity within partnerships. The doubled-up grammar echoes this feeling, as the phrase ‘Was out of work’ looks back to the ‘I’ of the previous line, and forward to the man who sold ‘his’ traps, not fully able to distinguish between the two men even as a distinction is being formulated. The final stanza is characteristic of Hardy's eerie end-games: its release from the broken rhythms of the previous stanzas should come as something of a relief, yet the acquired ease of the lines is precisely what is disturbing about them. The speaker could sound chirpy, uttering his conclusion with a shrug of the shoulders rather than with a belaboured sigh. Indeed, ‘quaint’ and ‘curious’ seem oddly cosy, as if the speaker is working too hard to suppress other kinds of adjective. It is as though his killing during the war has desensitized him, rendered him unable to weigh up the significance of his actions. This is a portrait not of the soldier as either victim or victor, but of the victor himself as a victim—seeking a numbness in rhythm and a shelter in euphemism. Hardy's war poems frequently end with this kind of blank stare; war has inflicted itself on the fabric of the poem's attenuated form, rather than being something that the form describes.

A. E. Housman was another who was intent on shaping poems that were not straightforwardly pro- or anti-war, but that could muster the poise to count costs alongside blessings. Even before the Boer War, he was mulling over what it might mean to fight for Queen and country. ‘1887’, the opening poem of A Shropshire Lad (1896), plumbs the depths of the phrase ‘God save the Queen’ in order to consider the need for the soldiers, those other kinds of saviour ‘who shared the work with God’. 104 Such wry observations do not quite toe the patriotic line, but nor do they mock it. In Housman's work, the call of battle is neither wholly championed nor belittled; ‘XXXV’ in Shropshire Lad is representative of the poet's divided allegiances, and of those of Victorian war poetry more generally, so I quote it in full:

On the idle hill of summer, Sleepy with the flow of streams, Far I hear the steady drummer Drumming like a noise in dreams. Far and near and low and louder On the roads of earth go by, Dear to friends and food for powder, Soldiers marching, all to die. East and west on fields forgotten Bleach the bones of comrades slain, Lovely lads and dead and rotten; None that go return again. Far the calling bugles hollo, High the screaming fife replies, Gay the files of scarlet follow: Woman bore me, I will rise. 105

In his study of the literature of war, Andrew Rutherford quotes Arnold Kettle's assertion that ‘the refusal to be heroic may be very human, but it is also less than human’ before noting that ‘literature which explores this paradox deserves more critical attention than it currently receives’. The endorsement of the quiet life in the pastoral code should not play down the heroic life of action, he explains, because ‘heroic virtues are needed to protect the innocence of the pastoral world from the violence and evil which would otherwise destroy it’. 106 Victorian war poetry is often responsive to this insight, and Housman's speaker on the idle hill acknowledges even as he would seem to resist it. The poem is a rich compound of competing voices; the lines ‘Dear to friends and food for powder , | Soldiers marching, all to die ’, for instance, play off two of the most renowned commentators on war's absurdity and its necessity, Falstaff and Hotspur. The first allows room for Falstaff's sense of the hollowness of war in his comment on the soldiers as mere ‘food for powder’, yet the second is perhaps responsive to Hotspur's sense of the honour of war in his call to the men, ‘die all, die merrily’. 107 Neither voice is fully persuasive (Falstaff can sound expediently unprincipled, and Hotspur blithely inhumane), but their dialogue stages questions that Housman is frequently intent upon asking about war. Like the speaker of Maud , haunted by the march ‘with banner and bugle and fife’, this speaker's move to rise manages to sound both decided and exhausted, and the call of the bugles is itself rendered ambiguous as Housman's arch rhyme (‘hollo/follow’) gets to work on it; within the greeting ‘hollo’ one begins to hear something ‘hollow’. Indeed, it is not clear what the speaker's ‘rising’ portends—rising up to join the soldiers, or rising against them by moving further away.

Geoffrey Hill has questioned the achievement of Wilfred Owen's war poetry by suggesting that it ‘applies a balm of generalized sorrow at a point where the particulars of experience should outsmart that kind of consolation’. 108 One of the strengths of Housman's poem is that it breathes an air of ‘generalized sorrow’ without feeling complacent or merely luxurious. His speaker may perhaps be envious of the sleep of those dead who are unperturbed by noises in their dreams, but ‘Lovely lads and dead and rotten’ also conveys both pity and anger, a feeling that the particulars of experience are not to be tidied up into wholly consolatory patterns. This poem, and the one by Hardy, were both immensely popular in the trenches during the First World War; as Paul Fussell has argued, the work of these two poets in particular ‘anticipates [and] even helps to determine the imaginative means by which the war was conceived’. 109 But the richness of this work owes much, in turn, to the searchings of earlier Victorian war poetry, a poetry that—in its refusal to provide a ringing endorsement of war even as it remained wary of the dangers of that refusal—offered itself as bequest and as monitory force.

Robert Browning, quoted in The Poetical Works of Robert Browning , iii, ed. Ian Jack and Rowena Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 178.

Browning, ‘Incident of the French Camp’, ibid. 197.

Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986; 1st pub. 1918), 266.

Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990), p. ix.

See e.g. Jon Silkin, Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 26–7, and Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War , 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1980), 16.

M. Van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 310.

‘War poetry’ is not accorded a chapter (or even an index citation) in either Joseph Bristow (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) , or Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Anthony H. Harrison (eds.), A Companion to Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) . Instead, the emphasis is on patriotism; see Tricia Cootens, ‘Victorian poetry and patriotism’, in Bristow (ed.), Cambridge Companion , 255–79.

John Peck, War, the Army and Victorian Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), p. xiii.

Edward Creasy, Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Waterloo , i (London: Bentley, 1851), pp. iii–iv.

See Robert Giddings, Imperial Echoes: Eye-Witness Accounts of Victoria's Little Wars (London: Cooper, 1996), p. xvi.

See Max Arthur, Symbol of Courage: A History of the Victoria Cross (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2004) .

Wilfred Owen, quoted in Hynes, A War Imagined , 246.

Punch , 28 (17 Feb. 1855), 64.

Matthew Arnold, ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold , i, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 23.

Arnold, ‘Preface to the First Edition of Poems ’ (1853), in The Poems of Matthew Arnold , ed. Miriam Allott, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1979), 654.

Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, ibid. 254.

Arnold, ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’, 28.

Matthew Campbell, ‘Poetry and War’, in Neil Roberts (ed.), A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 65.

Arnold, ‘Preface’, 657 and 659.

Simone Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force , trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle Hill, 1956), 27, 29, 31.

Arnold, Sohrab and Rustum , in Poems of Matthew Arnold , 345–6.

Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), 216.

See Matthew Paul Lalumia, Realism and Politics in Victorian Art of the Crimean War (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984) .

See Andrew Lambert and Stephen Badsey, The War Correspondents: The Crimean War (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994) .

William Howard Russell, in The Times , 12 Feb. 1855, 9.

Russell, in The Times , 25 Nov. 1854, 9.

‘War and Poetry’, Edinburgh Review , 196 (July 1902), 53.

Westland Marston, The Death-Ride: A Tale of the Light Brigade (London: Mitchell, 1855), 8.

See Geoffrey Regan, Someone Had Blundered: A Historical Survey of Military Incompetence (London: Batsford, 1987), 192–208.

T. S. Eliot, quoted in Dominic Hibberd (ed.), Poetry of the First World War: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1981), 52.

Russell, in The Times , 14 Nov. 1854, 7.

Trudi Tate, ‘On Not Knowing Why: Memorializing the Light Brigade’, in Helen Small and Trudi Tate (eds.), Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 166.

Tennyson to unknown recipient [probably Sydney Dobell], 23 Jan. 1855, in The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson , ii, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 104.

Tennyson, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, in Poems of Tennyson , ii, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1987), 511–13.

Tennyson, quoted in Matthew Bevis (ed.), Lives of Victorian Literary Figures: Tennyson (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 84.

W. F. Rawnsley, quoted in Bevis (ed.), Lives , 83.

James Friswell (ed.), Songs of the War (London: Ward & Lock, 1855), p. ii.

Martin Tupper, ‘The Van and the Rear’, in A Batch of War Ballads (London: Bosworth, 1854), 6.

The Times , 25 Aug. 1855, 8. Punch echoed such criticisms; see ‘The War Poets’, Punch , 28 (13 Jan. 1854), 17.

John Addington Symonds to Charlotte Symonds, ? May 1857, in The Letters of John Addington Symonds , i, ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), 105.

Henry and Franklin Lushington, ‘Preface’, in La Nation Boutiquièere & Other Poems Chiefly Political and Points of War (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1855), p. xxv.

Thomas Carlyle, Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in Literature (London: Dent, 1908), 312.

Tennyson, ‘Epilogue’, in Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava , in The Poems of Tennyson , iii, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1987), 97.

Tennyson, Maud , in Poems of Tennyson , ii. 513–84.

Tennyson, in conversation with James Knowles, quoted in Gordon N. Ray, Tennyson Reads Maud (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1968), 23.

See Trevor Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War 1854–1856 (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999) .

G. C. Swayne, ‘Peace and War: A Dialogue’, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine , 76 (1854), 592.

Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Present System of Recruiting in the Army (London, 1861), p. xvii.

See Edgar Shannon, ‘The Critical Reception of Tennyson's Maud ’, PMLA , 68 (1953), 397–417.

William Morris, ‘Concerning Geffray Teste Noir’, in The Collected Works of William Morris , ed. May Morris, i (London: Longmans, Green, 1910) , 76 and 78.

Morris, ‘The Wind’, ibid. 110.

George Meredith, ‘Grandfather Bridgeman’, in The Poetical Works of George Meredith (London: Constable, 1912), 125.

Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 107.

The Times , 17 Sep. 1857, 9.

Mary E. Leslie, ‘Massacre at Cawnpore, 1857’, in Sorrows, Aspirations, and Legends from India (London, 1858) ; repr. in Donald Thomas (ed.), The Everyman Book of Victorian Verse: The Pre-Raphaelites to the Nineties (London: Dent, 1993), 161.

Tupper, quoted in Sashi Bhusan Chaudhuri, English Historical Writing on the Indian Mutiny 1857–1859 (Calcutta: World Press, 1979), 259.

Ronald Hyam, Britain's Imperial Century 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (London: Batsford, 1976), 224.

Christina Rossetti, ‘In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857’, in The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti , i, ed. R. W. Crump (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 26.

See The Times report on 11 Sept. 1857, 7. Rossetti added a note to the poem in 1875 to acknowledge the factual inaccuracy.

See Mat thew Bevis, ‘Tennyson's Civil Tongue’, Tennyson Research Bulletin , 7/3 (Nov. 1999), 113–25.

Herbert Tucker, ‘Epic’, in A Companion to Victorian Poetry , 32.

Tennyson, ‘The Last Tournament’, in Poems of Tennyson , iii. 521–2.

Timothy Lovelace, The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson's Battle Poetry (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 165.

See Peter Burroughs, ‘An Unreformed Army? 1815–1868’, in David Chandler and Ian Beckett (eds.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 160–88, and John R. Reed, ‘Military’, in Herbert Tucker (ed.), A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 183–93.

See Edward M. Spiers, The Army and Society 1815–1914 (London: Longman, 1980) , 77 and 162.

Robert MacDonald, Personal Narrative of Military Travel and Adventure in Turkey and Persia (Edinburgh: Black, 1859), 296.

The Times , 22 Oct. 1856, 6.

Samuel Smiles, Self-Help , ed. Peter Sinnema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 331.

Francis Hastings Doyle, ‘The Private of the Buffs’, in Edmund Clarence Stedman (ed.), A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895) .

See Olive Anderson, ‘The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain’, English Historical Review , 86 (Jan. 1971), 46–72.

See Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), 79–155.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in ‘The Soldier’, in Poems and Prose , ed. W. H. Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 60.

Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Instructor’, in The Definitive Edition of Rudyard Kipling's Verse (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989; 1st pub. 1940), 472.

See Philip Warner, Dervish: The Rise and Fall of an African Empire (London: Macdonald, 1973), 134.

Melton Prior, Campaigns of a War Correspondent (London: Arnold, 1912), 287.

J. A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 2.

G. W. Hunt, ‘Macdermott's War Song’, repr. in The Music Hall Songster (London: Fortney, 1893) , n. p.

Henry Pettit, quoted in Peter Davison, ‘A Briton True: A Short Account of Patriotic Songs and Verse and Popular Entertainment’, Alta (Spring 1970), 216.

Steve Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 30.

The working-class inflection of this voice is also important, as Attridge explains: ‘A growing recognition of Tommy Atkins's background grew contemporaneously with an awareness of the effects of material deprivation among the working class. … The soldier figure is both accommodated and distanced, supported and derided, an expression of unity and of class antagonism’ ( ibid. 69 and 43).

J. B. Booth, A Pink ′Un Remembers (London: Laurie, 1937), 123.

Kipling, ‘Tommy’, in Rudyard Kipling's Verse , 399.

John Macleay, in idem (ed.), War Songs and Ballads of Martial Life (London: Scott, 1900), pp. xxvi–xxvii.

Kipling, ‘That Day’, in Rudyard Kipling's Verse , 437.

Daniel Karlin, in Rudyard Kipling: A Critical Edition of the Major Works , ed. Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. xxi.

Kipling, ‘The Young British Soldier’, in Rudyard Kipling's Verse , 418.

For a representative selection, see Elleke Boehmer (ed.), Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) .

See e.g. William Ernest Henley (ed.), Lyra Heroica: A Book of Verse for Boys (London: David Nutt, 1892) , which focuses exclusively on ‘the beauty and blessedness of death, the glory of battle and adventure, the nobility of devotion’ (p. vii).

Henry Newbolt, ‘Vitaï Lampada’, in Admirals All and Other Verses (London: Mathews, 1897); repr. in Boehmer (ed.), Empire Writing , 287.

War and Poetry′, 40, 50–1, 53–4.

See Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War (London: John Murray, 2002) .

A. C. Swinburne, ‘The Transvaal’, The Times , 11 Oct. 1899, 7; repr. in Swinburne's Collected Poetical Works , ii (London: William Heinemann, 1935), 1223.

William Ernest Henley, ‘Remonstrance’, first published in For England's Sake: Verses and Songs in Time of War (London: David Nutt, 1900); repr. in Boehmer (ed.), Empire Writing , 283.

See e.g. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: Nisbet, 1902).

W. H. Colby, The Echo , 13 Oct. 1899.

Van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge , 122.

Thomas Hardy, quoted in Kathryn R. King and William W. Morgan, ‘Hardy and The Boer War: The Public Poet in Spite of Himself’, Victorian Poetry , 17 (1979), 66–84.

Hardy, ‘Embarcation’, in The Complete Poems , ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), 86.

‘English Patriotic Poetry’, Quarterly Review , 192 (1900), 526 and 536. For another contemporary review which noticed a change in tune, see J. A. R. Marriott, ‘The Imperial Note in Victorian Poetry’, Nineteenth Century , 48 (1900), 236–48.

Hardy, ‘The Man He Killed’, in Complete Poems , 287.

A. E. Housman, ‘1887’, in A Shropshire Lad , in Collected Poems and Selected Prose , ed. Christopher Ricks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 23.

Housman, ‘XXXV’, in A Shropshire Lad , ibid. 59.

Andrew Rutherford, The Literature of War: Five Studies in Heroic Virtue (London: Macmillan, 1978) , 2 and 9.

William Shakespeare, The First Part of King Henry IV , IV. ii. 62 and IV. i. 135.

Geoffrey Hill, ‘ “I in Another Place”: Homage to Keith Douglas’, Stand , 6/4 (1964 – 5), 7 .

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 282.

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The War Inside: An Analysis of Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est

Key takeaway:.

Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” vividly portrays the horrors of war, specifically focusing on the physical and emotional toll it takes on soldiers.
The poem exposes the false perception of war glorification and challenges the notion of dying nobly for one’s country.
Owen’s use of descriptive language and powerful imagery effectively conveys the reality and brutality of war, leaving a lasting impact on readers.

Wilfred Owen’s powerful poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” offers a haunting perspective on the horrors of war. In this introduction, we will delve into the background of Wilfred Owen, provide an overview of the poem, and unfold the thesis statement that forms the basis of our analysis. Brace yourself as we navigate the depths of this poignant piece, shedding light on the war’s devastating reality.

Background of Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen was born on March 18, 1893 in Shropshire, England . His early life was shaped by his strong religious beliefs and his passion for literature . When World War I broke out, he enlisted in the army and was sent to the battlefields of France. There, he encountered the brutal realities of war and its devastating effects.

His poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” is one of his most renowned works. Written in 1917, it reveals the physical and psychological hardships of war. By employing vivid descriptions and powerful imagery, Owen exposes the true nature of conflict and challenges popular notions of its nobility and glamor.

Owen’s poems focus on displaying the grim reality of warfare instead of glorifying it. He believed war was far from honorable or noble, and brought immense suffering and death to those involved. Through his work, he sought to make people question the notion that it is honorable to die for one’s country. He aimed to convey the true horrors of war to an unsuspecting audience.

Overview of the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”

Wilfred Owen’s “ Dulce et Decorum Est ” is an effective poem. It shows the horror of war. Through great imagery and words, Owen makes a disturbing image of the physical and emotional harm war has on soldiers. The poem questions the belief that it is noble to die for one’s country.

In stanza 1 , Owen reveals the tiredness and misery of the soldiers. He talks of their haggard faces and weary bodies. He also talks of the feelings of desperation and the wish for death.

Stanza 2 is about a gas attack and the panic it causes. Owen talks of the soldiers’ vulnerability in their protective gear. He conveys confusion and disorder with soldiers drugged and drained.

In stanza 3 , Owen talks of the harm mustard gas does to its victims. He paints a picture of the slow and agonizing death. He compares it to a nightmare and questions if war is really honorable.

In stanza 4 , Owen speaks to war journalist Jessie Pope. He criticizes her glorification of war and contrasts it with his own portrayal of suffering due to mustard gas. He argues that war is not noble.

To understand poetry, pay attention to the imagery and the context in which it was written. Learn the bitter truth of war through Owen’s “ Dulce et Decorum Est .” War is not sweet or glorious.

Thesis statement: The analysis of the poem and its depiction of the horrors of war

Wilfred Owen’s poem “ Dulce et Decorum Est ” explores the brutality of war. It shows the physical and emotional pain experienced by soldiers on the battlefield. The poem’s goal is to reveal the harsh truth behind war – beyond the romanticized ideas of heroism and patriotism.

Stanza 1 displays the exhaustion and suffering of the soldiers. Owen gives a vivid description of their physical state, highlighting their weary condition. He also highlights their emotional state – a feeling of despair and a yearning for death as an escape from the torment.

Stanza 2 focuses on a gas attack and its disastrous aftermath. The protective gear proves to be useless, leaving the soldiers exposed to the gaseous poison. They appear dazed and drained, embodying their struggle against an unforgiving enemy.

Stanza 3 describes the mustard gas and its horrific effects. Owen compares it to a nightmare, capturing the gruesome reality of those exposed to it. He cautions against embracing false ideas of honor in participating in war.

In Stanza 4 , Owen criticizes war journalist Jessie Pope while displaying the mustard gas-induced agony. He condemns not only Pope’s glorification of war but also society’s romanticization of dying for one’s country. Through vivid imagery and descriptions, he seeks to reveal the true horrors of war.

Analysis of Stanza 1: Exhaustion and Misery

In the first stanza of Wilfred Owen’s powerful poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” we delve into the raw depths of exhaustion and misery experienced by the soldiers. Through a vivid description of their physical appearance and an exploration of their emotional state, we uncover the haunting realities of war. Let’s dissect this opening stanza and unravel the profound impact it has on the reader.

Description of the soldiers’ physical appearance

The poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen depicts the physical toll of war on the soldiers. He portrays them as exhausted and miserable .

The soldiers are “bent double,” a hunched posture from the weight of war. Their clothing is tattered and torn , symbolizing their struggles. They have “lame” boots and “blood-shod” feet, from the pain of every step.

They trudge through mud , weighed down by their gear. Their faces are “white,” and their eyes filled with despair.

Owen does not shy away from depicting the realities of war, and captures the weariness and degradation of the soldiers. Through this, he allows readers to empathize with their suffering.

The poem serves as a reminder of the sacrifices of those in armed conflicts and challenges romanticized notions of warfare.

Exploration of the soldiers’ emotional state

Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” paints a vivid picture of the soldiers’ emotional state. Their profound despair and desire for release from the horrors of war is explored. The burden of their experiences weigh them down. Their emotion is described as utter hopelessness and desperation. This serves as a reminder of the psychological effect of war.

Owen expertly uses language and imagery to capture the soldiers’ emotions. The words “trudge” and “lame” illustrate their physical weariness. The phrase “drunk with fatigue” conveys their exhaustion and mental toll. Readers are invited to sympathize with and recognize the trauma endured.

Vivid metaphors are used to show the overwhelming despair of the soldiers. Their longing for death is compared to drowning. Owen presents the devastating impact of war on individuals.

Feeling of hopelessness

Wilfred Owen’s poem “ Dulce et Decorum Est ” paints a vivid, poignant picture of wartime horrors. Stanza 2 explains how soldiers respond to gas attacks and the chaos and suffocating fumes that cause their sense of hopelessness.

Stanza 3 shows a man slowly dying from mustard gas, emphasizing the soldiers’ helplessness. Stanza 4 speaks to war journalist Jessie Pope , condemning her for romanticizing war and contrasting it with its true brutality.

Owen effectively communicates the profound sense of hopelessness felt by those on the front lines. His purpose is to debunk the glamorization of war and expose its true horrors. His poem creates an impact that lingers long after reading.

Desire for death

Wilfred Owen delves into the soldiers’ longing for death in his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est.” He paints a picture of their emotional state, showing how desperate they’ve become.

Stanza 1 details their physical deterioration due to war. Owen emphasizes the haggard appearance of the troops. This mirrors their inner turmoil and their willingness to accept death as an escape.

In Stanza 2 , he goes further into their reaction to a gas attack. Without proper protection, panic and confusion take over. The language used implies they are drugged and drained, wanting death to be their savior.

Stanza 3 dives into the slow, painful death from mustard gas exposure. This dream-like struggle for survival highlights the physical and psychological suffering of war.

Wilfred Owen experienced these horrors as a soldier on the Western Front. This experience influences his powerful poetry about war.

Analysis of Stanza 2: Gas Attack and Chaos

In stanza 2 of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” we delve into the harrowing reality of a gas attack and the ensuing chaos. This section vividly depicts the soldiers’ response to the gas attack and unravels the portrayal of the intense chaos and confusion that ensues. Prepare to be immersed in the haunting imagery and raw emotions conveyed in this pivotal stanza.

Depiction of the soldiers’ response to the gas attack

Wilfred Owen’s poem “ Dulce et Decorum Est ” vividly depicts the soldiers’ response to the gas attack. Stanza 2 portrays their panic and fear as they scramble to put on ineffective protective gear. It conveys a profound psychological impact of war, highlighting the soldiers’ vulnerability and numbed emotional state.

Owen’s portrayal shows them drugged and drained, demonstrating how war can dehumanize individuals and trap them in cycles of violence. Stanza 1 emphasizes their exhaustion and misery, providing context for understanding their response in Stanza 2 .

Owen offers a powerful insight into the horrors of war, reminding us that it has devastating effects on both body and mind. When discussing depictions of traumatic experiences like gas attacks in literature, sensitivity and empathy are key. Pay attention to the language used to convey the characters’ emotions, as this can provide deeper understanding of the human condition during times of war.

Portrayal of the chaos and confusion during the attack

Wilfred Owen’s “ Dulce et Decorum Est ” vividly portrays the chaos and confusion of a gas attack. He portrays soldiers’ panic and terror, showing how their gear fails to protect them. He describes the men as drugged and drained, conveying the disoriented state they’re in. His powerful imagery captures the overwhelming chaos and confusion of a gas attack.

In Stanza 2, Owen focuses on the ineffectiveness of protective gear. Mustard gas infiltrates, causing panic among the soldiers. They stumble over each other in an attempt to escape death. This exposes war’s grim reality, highlighting its devastating impact.

Owen also shows how the gas distorts reality, causing further chaos and confusion for the soldiers. His graphic imagery paints a bleak picture of suffering and despair. He urges us to question any glorification of war and calls for peace instead.

Ineffectiveness of protective gear

The soldiers in Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” experience the harsh realities of ineffective protections. Gas masks and clothing fail to keep out the poisonous gas. The soldiers are unable to escape, leaving them vulnerable to blistering and burning. Even with advancements in technology, their efforts to protect themselves are futile.

Owen recounts a true story of a soldier who failed to put on his gas mask in time. This soldier suffers excruciating pain and irreversible damage to his lungs . This serves as a reminder of the devastating consequences of inadequate protection .

The poem powerfully communicates Owen’s anti-war message . Glorification of war is exposed as a reminder of the true cost of conflict .

Soldiers appearing drugged and drained

Soldiers in Owen’s poem “ Dulce et Decorum Est ” appear drugged and drained . Their fatigue and trauma is highlighted in the details of their haggard faces and bloodshot eyes. War takes a psychological toll, leaving them feeling numb and detached.

The chaos and confusion of the gas attack make them even more vulnerable. Protective gear is useless. They struggle to survive as they stumble through a haze of poison gas.

Owen’s use of descriptive language presents them as figures in a nightmare – pale, disoriented, sluggish as if under a powerful sedative. The surreal quality of their suffering intensifies the image of them appearing drugged and drained .

Analysis of Stanza 3: The Horrors of Mustard Gas

Stanza 3 of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” takes us into the depths of the horrors inflicted by mustard gas. It vividly describes the excruciating journey towards death that victims of this brutal weapon endure. As we explore this stanza, we’ll witness Owen’s powerful comparison of the dying man’s struggle to a haunting nightmare. Moreover, we’ll uncover the profound irony as Owen sarcastically warns against the false perception of war as glorified and honorable.

Description of the slow and agonizing death caused by mustard gas

Wilfred Owen’s poem “ Dulce et Decorum Est ” paints a vivid picture of the slow and agonizing death caused by mustard gas.

“ Slow ” and “ agonizing ” paint a grim image of a prolonged, torturous death. Owen’s message? War is not honorable or heroic. It’s a nightmarish ordeal of unimaginable suffering.

He conveys this with a comparison to a nightmare. Fear and dread evoke in readers, ensuring they understand the true horror of mustard gas.

“Sweet dreams made of mustard gas, but war brings nightmares of brutal reality.”

Comparison of the dying man’s struggle to a nightmare

Wilfred Owen’s poem “ Dulce et Decorum Est ” unveils the devastating reality of war .

This stanza compares the dying man’s experience to a nightmare, signifying the intense agony he’s facing. Owen is demonstrating the nightmarish reality of war and its consequences on individuals.

He also highlights the mental trauma soldiers can suffer due to memories of war that might haunt them . Using vivid imagery and descriptive language, he challenges the notion that war is heroic or noble.

He effectively communicates the immense suffering faced by soldiers and disillusions the glorified image related to war .

Owen’s sarcastic warning about the false perception of war

Wilfred Owen, a WWI soldier, puts his personal experiences into “ Dulce et Decorum Est .” He challenges the thought of dying for one’s country being noble. He wants to warn people against the glamorizing of battle.

He uses irony and satire to show the brutal, dehumanizing reality of war. He depicts its gruesome consequences with powerful imagery and language. He contrasts the public’s perception and the actual horror.

Owen targets Jessie Pope, a war journalist who wrote poems to get people to enlist. He sarcastically addresses her in stanza four, showing her naive view of war.

His words are made more meaningful by his own experience as a soldier. He emphasizes the importance of questioning beliefs about war.

Owen’s warning about the false perception of war is a critique of its romanticization. He uses vivid language, irony, and satire to challenge society’s acceptance and show the true devastation of war.

Analysis of Stanza 4: Critique of War Glorification

In Stanza 4 of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” we delve into a powerful critique of war glorification. This section will explore Owen’s address to war journalist Jessie Pope, the vivid depiction of suffering caused by mustard gas, and his condemnation of the glorification of war and the concept of dying for one’s country. So, let’s dive into the searing analysis that challenges the romanticized notions surrounding the horrors of war.

Owen’s address to war journalist Jessie Pope

Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” is a scathing critique of war journalist Jessie Pope and her romanticized portrayal of war. In Stanza 4, Owen directly addresses Pope, exposing the disconnect between her glorified version and the real harshness of war.

He emphasizes the brutality and pain of soldiers with vivid descriptions of mustard gas. He condemns those who say dying for one’s country is honorable, showing the stark contrast between their rhetoric and the true horrors of battle.

Throughout the poem, Owen dismantles the glamorization of war. He invites readers to reconsider the glorified image perpetuated by figures like Pope. His words come from his own World War I experiences and show the dissonance between the ideal and the grim reality. His powerful words still ring true today, reminding us of the cost of warfare.

In summary, Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” challenges Jessie Pope’s romanticized view of war. He reveals the suffering of soldiers and criticizes the idea of heroism in battle. His personal experiences create a powerful reminder of the true price of warfare.

Vivid depiction of the suffering caused by mustard gas

Wilfred Owen’s poem, “ Dulce et Decorum Est ,” vividly paints the immense suffering mustard gas caused during WWI. Through powerful descriptions and vivid imagery, Owen expresses the horrifying truth of war and its devastating effect on soldiers.

The pain and helplessness of an individual exposed to mustard gas is hauntingly conveyed. Readers can almost see the horrific effects of this weapon of mass destruction , indiscriminately harming both enemy forces and innocent civilians. This stark portrayal challenges any romanticized ideas of war.

Owen includes specific details to enhance his depiction. He describes the soldiers as if drugged, drained of life and unable to function. It shows not only the physical toll , but also the psychological and emotional trauma .

The suffering caused by mustard gas in “ Dulce et Decorum Est ” serves as a reminder of what those involved in war must face. It questions heroic and patriotic ideals, exposing the true horrors of the battlefield. Through his poignant writing, Owen encourages society to think deeply about war , highlighting its destructive nature.

Through precise language, Wilfred Owen effectively portrays the suffering caused by mustard gas in “ Dulce et Decorum Est .” His purposeful depiction serves as an important critique against narratives that glorify war, while shedding light on its human cost.

Condemnation of the glorification of war and the nobility of dying for one’s country

Wilfred Owen’s iconic poem, “ Dulce et Decorum Est “, boldly challenges the notion that war is noble. Through vivid imagery, he reveals the harsh reality of war and its devastating effects on soldiers.

In stanza 4, Owen criticizes war journalist Jessie Pope for her romanticized view of war. He paints a picture of the intense suffering caused by mustard gas, emphasizing the difference between the glorified perception of war and its brutal actuality.

The poem’s soldiers are subjected to agonizing deaths from mustard gas, dispelling any illusions of honor or nobility in dying for one’s country. Owen reveals a stark contrast between public perception and the harsh reality experienced by those on the frontlines.

Ultimately, Owen’s “ Dulce et Decorum Est ” serves as a powerful indictment against those who seek to romanticize war. His compelling language and vivid descriptions challenge conventional narratives surrounding warfare and force readers to confront the harrowing truths behind patriotic rhetoric. Stripping away the glamour of war, one gas attack at a time – this is Wilfred Owen’s poetic masterpiece.

In the conclusion, we will summarize the main points discussed, examine the overall impact of Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” in conveying the harsh reality of war, and reflect on Owen’s purpose and message. By doing so, we gain a deeper understanding of the profound significance of this influential literary work.

Summary of the main points discussed

Wilfred Owen’s poem “ Dulce et Decorum Est ” uncovers the ugly truth of war .

Stanza 1 speaks of the weariness and grief of the soldiers, their physical state and mental distress. They are shown as jaded and disheartened, almost wishing for death.

Stanza 2 examines the pandemonium of a gas attack. It illustrates the soldiers’ reaction and the ineffectiveness of the protective gear. They appear confused and drained, as if under the influence of drugs.

Stanza 3 paints a picture of the fatal impact of mustard gas, comparing it to a horror. It also includes Owen’s critique of the false idea of war, challenging traditional beliefs of bravery.

In Stanza 4 , Owen addresses Jessie Pope and portrays the pain of mustard gas. He denounces the glorification of war and decries the notion that dying for one’s country is honorable.

These points reveal the true nature of war – its physical and emotional toll on soldiers, its chaos and destruction, and its dehumanizing effects. By bringing these issues to light, Owen strives to challenge society’s opinions of war.

War: where heroic dreams turn into gruesome nightmares, as displayed in Dulce et Decorum Est .

Overall impact of the poem in conveying the reality of war

Wilfred Owen’s poem “ Dulce et Decorum Est ” has a deep effect on portraying war’s harsh truth. Through its vivid and eerie imagery, Owen shows the physical and emotional burden that war puts on soldiers. By breaking the poem down, it’s obvious Owen wants to honestly depict war’s horrors.

Stanza 1 explains the soldiers’ worn-out and deplorable state, illustrating the aftermath of extended warfare. He also looks into their inner state, emphasizing hopelessness and even a wish for dying to escape their pain.

Stanza 2 details the gas attack and its ensuing pandemonium. Owen portrays their reaction, which involves useless protective gear and confusion. The soldiers are drugged and sapped, amplifying the chaos of war.

Stanza 3 emphasizes the torturous death caused by mustard gas. The drawn-out way of dying is likened to a nightmare, intensifying the terror. Sardonically, Owen warns against war’s romanticized aim.

Stanza 4 is Owen’s criticism of war journalist Jessie Pope. He vividly paints the mustard gas suffering to counter Pope’s idealized version of war. He also condemns war’s glorification and questions its nobility.

In conclusion, this powerful poem has a major impact in showing war’s reality. It forces readers to face soldiers’ physical and emotional traumas every day. Through his striking descriptions and fiery critique of war adoration, Wilfred Owen reveals the real terrors behind patriotic principles.

Reflection on Owen’s purpose and message

Wilfred Owen’s poem, “ Dulce et Decorum Est “, creates a powerful reflection on war. It’s vivid descriptions and emotional imagery effectively portray the immense suffering endured by soldiers. Owen’s aim is to challenge the glorification of war and reveal the false perception that dying for a country is noble . He paints a terrifying picture of war as a nightmare filled with exhaustion, misery, and chaos. Mustard gas is also a major part of this portrayal, emphasizing how it can dehumanize and leave soldiers defenseless.

This poem delves into Owen’s message, aimed at establishing an impact on readers . He conveys soldiers’ physical conditions with “sagging backs” in the first stanza, and their emotional despair in the longing for death. The second part focuses on the chaos and confusion during a gas attack and the uselessness of protective gear.

The fourth stanza is a condemnation of war journalist Jessie Pope . It vividly describes the suffering caused by mustard gas, and aims to provoke a reevaluation of society’s views on war.

These details demonstrate Owen’s goal to dismantle any romanticized ideas of war . He wants to expose the grim reality of war and dispute the notion that it is honorable or glorious.

Some Facts About “The War Inside: An Analysis of Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est”:

✅ Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum” portrays war as deadly, bloody, and disgusting. (Source: Team Research)
✅ Owen challenges the idea of dying for your country as heroic and suggests that it is instead disgusting and could cause hatred towards one’s own country. (Source: Team Research)
✅ The poem vividly describes the physical and psychological impact of war, particularly the horrors of gas warfare. (Source: Team Research)
✅ Owen uses vivid imagery and poetic devices to convey the cruel truths of war and expose the glorified image presented by propaganda. (Source: Cram.com)
✅ “Dulce et Decorum Est” breaks the conventions of early 20th-century modernism and idealistic war poetry, providing a haunting and realistic portrayal of war. (Source: Bartleby.com)

FAQs about The War Inside: An Analysis Of Wilfred Owen’S Dulce Et Decorum Est

What is the meaning of the phrase “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”.

The phrase “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” translates to “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” The phrase represents the glorification of war and the noble sacrifice of one’s life for the nation.

How does Wilfred Owen challenge the idea of dying for one’s country in “Dulce et Decorum Est”?

Wilfred Owen argues against the idea of dying for one’s country in his poem. He portrays war as deadly, bloody, and disgusting, emphasizing the harsh realities and the suffering experienced by soldiers. Owen suggests that the glorification of war is a deception and that the actual experience of warfare can make one resent their own country.

What literary devices does Wilfred Owen use in “Dulce et Decorum Est”?

Wilfred Owen employs various literary devices in his poem. He uses vivid imagery to create striking and realistic pictures of war, such as the soldiers being compared to “old beggars” and their twisted bodies. Owen also uses iambic pentameter to convey a sense of depression and melancholy, interrupted by spondees to reflect the horrors of war. Additionally, he uses harsh tones and language choices to emphasize the suffering and unfair deaths of the soldiers.

How does Wilfred Owen criticize war propaganda in “Dulce et Decorum Est”?

In “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Wilfred Owen criticizes war propaganda by exposing its deceitful nature. He contrasts the glorified image of war presented in propaganda with the gruesome realities experienced by soldiers. Owen challenges the idea that war is glorious and noble, condemning the dehumanization and atrocities that accompany it.

What impact did the mustard gas have on soldiers during World War I?

Mustard gas, used as a weapon of attack during World War I, had horrific effects on soldiers. It caused blisters, acute vomiting, internal and external bleeding, and could take weeks to kill its victims. The use of mustard gas intensified the suffering and physical and psychological damage experienced by soldiers on the battlefield.

Who influenced Wilfred Owen’s work and contributed to the publication of his poems?

Siegfried Sassoon, a poet and editor, had a significant impact on Wilfred Owen’s life and work. After Owen’s death, Sassoon compiled and published his poems in 1920. Sassoon’s guidance and support helped to bring recognition to Owen’s powerful and haunting poetry that depicted the horrors of war.

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The Wars by Timothy Findley: A Comprehensive Literary Analysis

Timothy Findley

The Wars by Timothy Findley is a powerful and thought-provoking novel that explores the devastating impact of war on individuals and society. This comprehensive literary analysis delves into the themes, characters, and symbolism in the novel, providing a deeper understanding of its significance and relevance to contemporary issues. From the portrayal of masculinity and gender roles to the use of animal imagery and the exploration of trauma and memory, this analysis illuminates the many layers of meaning in The Wars and offers insights into its enduring appeal.

Historical Context

The Wars by Timothy Findley is a novel that is set during the First World War. The historical context of the novel is crucial to understanding the themes and motifs that are present throughout the book. The First World War was a significant event in world history, and it had a profound impact on the people who lived through it. The war was fought between 1914 and 1918, and it involved many of the major powers of the time. The war was characterized by trench warfare, which was a new form of warfare that had never been seen before. The war was also marked by the use of new technologies, such as tanks and airplanes. The war had a significant impact on the people who fought in it, and it changed the way that people thought about war and conflict. The Wars by Timothy Findley is a novel that explores the impact of the First World War on the people who lived through it. The novel is a powerful exploration of the human experience of war, and it is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity.

Character Analysis

One of the most intriguing characters in Timothy Findley’s The Wars is Robert Ross. Robert is a young Canadian soldier who is sent to fight in World War I. Throughout the novel, Robert’s character undergoes a significant transformation as he experiences the horrors of war and grapples with his own personal demons.

At the beginning of the novel, Robert is portrayed as a sensitive and compassionate young man who is deeply affected by the suffering he witnesses on the battlefield. He is also haunted by the death of his sister, Rowena, and feels a sense of guilt for not being able to protect her. As the novel progresses, Robert becomes increasingly disillusioned with the war and begins to question the morality of the conflict.

Despite his growing disillusionment, Robert remains committed to his duty as a soldier and continues to fight bravely. However, his experiences on the battlefield take a toll on his mental and emotional well-being, and he begins to suffer from PTSD.

Overall, Robert Ross is a complex and multi-dimensional character who undergoes a significant transformation throughout the course of the novel. His experiences in the war force him to confront his own personal demons and question the morality of the conflict. Despite the trauma he experiences, Robert remains a sympathetic and relatable character who readers will root for until the very end.

Symbolism and Imagery

Symbolism and Imagery play a significant role in Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars. The author uses various symbols and images to convey the themes of the novel. One of the most prominent symbols in the novel is the horse. The horse represents innocence, beauty, and freedom. Robert Ross’s connection with the horse is a symbol of his desire for freedom and his innocence. The horse also symbolizes the destruction of innocence and beauty during the war. Another significant symbol in the novel is the mud. The mud represents the filth and degradation of war. The mud is a constant reminder of the horrors of war and the destruction it brings. The imagery in the novel is also powerful. Findley uses vivid descriptions of the war to create a sense of horror and despair. The imagery of the trenches, the dead bodies, and the destruction of nature all contribute to the overall theme of the novel. The use of symbolism and imagery in The Wars is a testament to Timothy Findley’s skill as a writer. These literary devices help to create a powerful and emotional story that resonates with readers long after they have finished reading the novel.

Themes and Motifs

One of the most prominent themes in Timothy Findley’s The Wars is the destructive nature of war. Throughout the novel, the reader is exposed to the horrors of World War I through the experiences of protagonist Robert Ross. Findley portrays the war as a senseless and brutal conflict that destroys not only the physical landscape but also the mental and emotional well-being of those involved. The motif of animals is also prevalent in the novel, with Robert’s love for animals serving as a symbol of his compassion and sensitivity in a world that has become increasingly violent and cruel. The use of animals as a motif also highlights the theme of the interconnectedness of all living beings and the devastating impact of war on the natural world. Overall, the themes and motifs in The Wars serve to underscore the novel’s powerful anti-war message and its exploration of the human cost of conflict.

Narrative Structure

The narrative structure of Timothy Findley’s The Wars is complex and multi-layered, reflecting the fragmented and chaotic nature of the First World War itself. The novel is divided into five sections, each of which is further divided into multiple chapters, and the narrative shifts between different perspectives and time periods. This non-linear structure allows Findley to explore the psychological and emotional impact of the war on his characters, as well as the broader social and political context in which the conflict took place. At the same time, the fragmented structure of the novel also reflects the disorienting and dislocating experience of war, as soldiers were constantly moving from one place to another and struggling to make sense of their surroundings. Overall, the narrative structure of The Wars is a powerful and effective means of conveying the complex and often contradictory realities of the First World War, and it remains one of the novel’s most distinctive and memorable features.

Point of View

The point of view in Timothy Findley’s The Wars is a crucial aspect of the novel’s success. The story is told from the perspective of Robert Ross, a young Canadian soldier who is sent to fight in World War I. Through Robert’s eyes, the reader is able to experience the horrors of war and the emotional toll it takes on those who are forced to participate in it.

Robert’s point of view is particularly effective because it allows the reader to see the war from a personal and intimate perspective. We are able to understand the thoughts and feelings of a single soldier, rather than just seeing the war as a distant and abstract concept. This makes the novel much more powerful and emotionally resonant.

Additionally, Robert’s point of view allows us to see the war from a Canadian perspective. The Wars is a uniquely Canadian novel, and Robert’s experiences as a Canadian soldier are an important part of the story. Through his eyes, we are able to see how the war affected Canada and its people, and how it shaped the country’s identity.

Overall, the point of view in The Wars is a key element of the novel’s success. It allows us to experience the war in a personal and emotional way, and it gives us a uniquely Canadian perspective on this important historical event.

Language and Style

In terms of language and style, Timothy Findley’s The Wars is a masterful work of literature. The novel is written in a clear and concise prose that is both engaging and thought-provoking. Findley’s use of language is particularly noteworthy, as he employs a variety of literary techniques to convey his message. One of the most striking aspects of the novel is its use of imagery. Findley’s descriptions of the war-torn landscape are vivid and evocative, painting a picture of the horrors of war that is both haunting and unforgettable. Additionally, the novel’s use of symbolism is also noteworthy. The recurring image of the horse, for example, serves as a powerful metaphor for the destruction and chaos of war. Overall, The Wars is a testament to the power of language and style in literature, and a must-read for anyone interested in the art of storytelling.

War as a Metaphor

War has been used as a metaphor in literature for centuries, and Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars, is no exception. The novel explores the physical and emotional effects of World War I on soldiers and civilians alike, but it also delves into the metaphorical wars that characters face within themselves and in their relationships with others. Findley uses war as a metaphor to comment on the destructive nature of human conflict and the lasting impact it can have on individuals and society as a whole. Through his vivid descriptions of battle scenes and the psychological trauma experienced by his characters, Findley creates a powerful commentary on the human condition and the consequences of our actions.

Psychological Impact of War

The psychological impact of war is a recurring theme in Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars. The novel explores the devastating effects of war on the human psyche, particularly on the soldiers who are forced to endure the horrors of combat. Findley’s portrayal of the psychological trauma of war is both poignant and powerful, and it serves as a stark reminder of the toll that war takes on those who fight it. Through his vivid descriptions of the soldiers’ experiences, Findley highlights the emotional and psychological scars that war leaves behind, and he underscores the importance of recognizing and addressing the mental health needs of veterans. Overall, The Wars is a powerful testament to the enduring impact of war on the human psyche, and it serves as a poignant reminder of the need to support those who have sacrificed so much in service to their country.

Gender Roles and Expectations

In Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars, gender roles and expectations play a significant role in shaping the characters’ experiences and relationships. The novel is set during World War I, a time when traditional gender roles were deeply ingrained in society. Men were expected to be strong, brave, and willing to fight for their country, while women were expected to be nurturing and supportive of their husbands and sons who went off to war.

The protagonist of the novel, Robert Ross, struggles with these gender expectations throughout the story. As a young man, he is expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a successful businessman. However, Robert is more interested in nature and animals, which are traditionally seen as feminine interests. When he enlists in the army, he is expected to be a brave and fearless soldier, but he is haunted by the violence and brutality of war.

Similarly, the female characters in the novel also face gender expectations that limit their freedom and agency. Robert’s sister, Rowena, is expected to be a dutiful daughter and wife, but she rebels against these expectations by pursuing her own interests and passions. Robert’s love interest, Barbara, is also constrained by gender roles, as she is expected to be a proper and obedient wife to her husband.

Through these characters, Findley explores the ways in which gender roles and expectations can be oppressive and limiting, particularly during times of war. The novel challenges traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, and suggests that individuals should be free to pursue their own interests and identities, regardless of societal expectations.

The Significance of the Title

The title of a literary work is often the first thing that catches a reader’s attention. It sets the tone for the story and gives readers a glimpse into what they can expect. In the case of Timothy Findley’s novel, “The Wars,” the title is significant in several ways.

Firstly, the title is straightforward and unambiguous. It tells readers that the novel is about war, which is a topic that has been explored in countless works of literature. However, the title also suggests that there is something unique about the war that is being depicted in the novel.

Secondly, the title is plural, which implies that there are multiple wars being fought within the novel. This is an accurate representation of the story, as the protagonist, Robert Ross, is involved in several conflicts throughout the novel.

Finally, the title is significant because it highlights the overarching theme of the novel, which is the destructive nature of war. Through the experiences of Robert Ross and the other characters in the novel, Findley shows readers the devastating effects that war can have on individuals and society as a whole.

Overall, the title of “The Wars” is an important aspect of the novel that sets the stage for the story and highlights its central themes.

Literary Influences

One of the most notable literary influences on Timothy Findley’s The Wars is the work of Ernest Hemingway. Findley’s sparse and direct prose style, as well as his focus on the psychological effects of war on individuals, can be traced back to Hemingway’s own writing. In particular, the character of Robert Ross shares many similarities with Hemingway’s famous protagonist, Jake Barnes, from The Sun Also Rises. Both men are deeply affected by their experiences in war and struggle to find meaning and purpose in their lives afterwards. However, while Hemingway’s work often portrays a sense of stoic resignation in the face of tragedy, Findley’s novel is more overtly critical of the destructive nature of war and the societal structures that perpetuate it.

The Role of Memory

Memory plays a crucial role in Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars. The protagonist, Robert Ross, is haunted by memories of his past experiences in the war. These memories not only shape his character but also influence his actions throughout the novel. The novel explores the idea that memory is not just a passive recollection of the past but an active force that shapes our present and future. Through Robert’s memories, the novel also highlights the traumatic effects of war on individuals and the importance of remembering and acknowledging the sacrifices made by soldiers. Overall, memory is a central theme in The Wars and is used to explore the complex and often devastating effects of war on individuals and society.

The Importance of Music

Music plays a significant role in Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars. It serves as a means of communication, expression, and connection between the characters. The protagonist, Robert Ross, finds solace in music during his time in the trenches of World War I. The music allows him to escape the horrors of war and connect with his fellow soldiers on a deeper level. Additionally, music is used to convey the emotions and themes of the novel. The haunting melody of the “Last Post” is played at the funerals of fallen soldiers, emphasizing the tragedy and loss of war. Overall, music is an essential element in The Wars, highlighting its importance in human connection and emotional expression.

The Use of Flashbacks

The use of flashbacks in Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars, is a crucial element in the development of the story and the characters. The novel is set during World War I and follows the journey of Robert Ross, a young Canadian soldier who is sent to fight in Europe. Throughout the novel, the reader is taken back and forth between the present and the past, as Robert’s memories and experiences are revealed through a series of flashbacks. These flashbacks not only provide insight into Robert’s character but also serve to highlight the themes of the novel, such as the destructive nature of war and the importance of human connection. Findley’s use of flashbacks is masterful, as he seamlessly weaves together past and present to create a powerful and poignant narrative.

The Role of Nature

In Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars, nature plays a significant role in shaping the characters and their experiences. The novel is set during World War I, and the natural world serves as a stark contrast to the violence and destruction of the war. The protagonist, Robert Ross, finds solace in nature and often seeks refuge in it when he is overwhelmed by the horrors of war. The novel also explores the destructive impact of human actions on the natural world, highlighting the interconnectedness of all living things. Through its portrayal of nature, The Wars offers a powerful commentary on the relationship between humanity and the environment.

The Concept of Heroism

The concept of heroism is a recurring theme in Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars. The protagonist, Robert Ross, is often portrayed as a hero, but the novel also challenges traditional notions of heroism. Ross’s actions are not always heroic in the traditional sense, and the novel raises questions about the nature of heroism and the role of the individual in society. Findley’s exploration of heroism adds depth and complexity to the novel, and forces readers to consider their own beliefs about what it means to be a hero.

The Exploration of Trauma

In Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars, the exploration of trauma is a central theme. The protagonist, Robert Ross, experiences various traumatic events throughout the novel, including witnessing the death of his sister, participating in the brutalities of war, and being accused of a crime he did not commit. Findley’s portrayal of trauma is not limited to the physical and emotional effects on the individual, but also the societal and cultural impact. The novel highlights the ways in which trauma can shape and define a person’s identity, as well as the ways in which it can be perpetuated through generations. Through Robert’s journey, Findley offers a poignant commentary on the lasting effects of trauma and the importance of acknowledging and addressing it.

The Significance of Silence

Silence is a recurring theme in Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars. It is a powerful tool that the author uses to convey the emotions and thoughts of the characters. The significance of silence in the novel is multifaceted. It represents the unspeakable horrors of war, the inability to communicate effectively, and the emotional distance between individuals. The silence in the novel is not just the absence of sound, but it is also the absence of communication and understanding. It is a reminder of the limitations of language and the power of nonverbal communication. The silence in the novel is a reflection of the characters’ inner turmoil and their struggle to come to terms with the atrocities of war. It is a poignant reminder of the human cost of war and the need for empathy and understanding.

Abraham Lincoln and northern memory

Lincoln and idealized depictions of him loom large over Civil War history.

Statue of Abraham Lincoln in Portland, Oregon, toppled during the Indigenous Peoples Day of Rage on October 11, 2020. George Fite Waters, Abraham Lincoln , 1927, bronze, 10 feet high, photo © Sergio Olmos

On October 11, 2020, protesters in Portland, Oregon, toppled a statue of Abraham Lincoln, spray painting its hands blood red and its plinth with reminders of Lincoln’s role in suppressing Indigenous peoples: “LAND BACK,” a protester scrawled on one side of the stone marker, connecting Lincoln with the accelerated dispossession of Native lands that occurred during and after the Civil War, and “DAKOTA 38” on another side, referencing the mass execution of Dakota men that Lincoln ordered in 1862.

In December 2020, city officials in Boston removed from a public square a statue of Lincoln, commonly known as the Emancipation Group , in which a standing Lincoln appears to bestow freedom on a kneeling Black man. This was a copy of a Thomas Ball statue erected in 1876 that is still on site in Washington, D.C. The Boston statue had drawn the ire of residents who found its composition demeaning, seeing it as emphasizing Black subservience.

Boston officials remove a statue of Abraham Lincoln standing above a kneeling emancipated person on December 29, 2020. Thomas Ball, Emancipation Group (recasting of Freedmen’s Memorial ), 1879, bronze, photo © Nancy Lane/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald

A reckoning

To some observers, the removal of statues of Abraham Lincoln—the sixteenth president of the United States, who led the nation to victory in the Civil War (1861–65) and signed the Emancipation Proclamation —was a sign that the recent iconoclasm of Civil War statues had gone too far. “What started out as an earnest effort by some to remove statues glorifying a rebellion by the slavery-defending Confederacy has devolved into an absurd effort to destroy all vestiges of the past,” opined the editorial board of the Denver Gazette , noting that the original Ball statue in Washington, D.C. had been financed by formerly enslaved Black people in the years after the Civil War. [1] Others celebrated the removal of statues which they had perceived as chilling public reminders of white supremacy and Indigenous erasure . The Boston mayor’s office told the press that “The decision for removal acknowledges the statue’s role in perpetuating harmful prejudices and obscuring the role of Black Americans in shaping the nation’s fight for freedom.” [2]

But the Portland and Boston Lincoln statues are only two of the more than 100 statues of Civil War-era public figures that have been removed since 2015, with most protesters and cities focusing their efforts on removing monuments honoring the defeated Confederacy. Although there was no small amount of controversy over taking down Confederate monuments , efforts to remove statues honoring figures from the victorious U.S. forces—like Lincoln—has led to some head scratching. Weren’t these the good guys in the Civil War, who kept the country from splitting apart and brought about emancipation? Why should their likenesses be torn down alongside those of the men who fought to preserve slavery? Are “all vestiges of the past” really doomed to be expunged from the landscape?

The purpose of public monuments, and which voices and images ought to be celebrated in public art and memorials, is a topic that will likely continue to be hotly debated in the coming years. But the calls for removing monuments to Abraham Lincoln and other heroes of the United States during the Civil War help to illuminate the ways in which these portrayals have often escaped the scrutiny given to Confederate monuments.

When we think of the mythology that emerged from the American Civil War, we tend to focus on the myth of the Lost Cause —white southerners’ efforts to rewrite the reasons for the war and its outcome. But white northerners also engaged in mythmaking, elevating political and military leaders to sainthood and downplaying the importance of emancipation (and self-emancipation ) in the war effort. [3] Therefore, monuments to U.S. Civil War heroes, just like monuments to the Confederacy, are not neutral or objective records of the past; like any work of art or historical source they promote some ideas and obscure others.

S.J. Ferris, Washington & Lincoln (Apotheosis) , 1865, albumen print on carte-de-visite ( Library of Congress )

This essay will examine visual depictions of Abraham Lincoln, whose image has mirrored the broader project of northern Civil War memory and mythmaking. While he was in office, Lincoln’s image was closely tied to public opinion of the war effort and the actions of his administration. But after his assassination—the first of a president in U.S. history—Lincoln was portrayed in art as a Christ-like figure who had died in pursuit of the Union’s salvation. Art celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation celebrated Lincoln alone, rather than a vast network of abolitionists , soldiers, and self-emancipated Black people who worked to end slavery. These images both reflected and helped to reinforce the process of reunion that took place between white northerners and former Confederates in the fifty years after the Civil War. As the federal government abandoned its pursuit of Black citizenship, memorials ceased to emphasize the end of slavery as an important part of U.S. victory in the Civil War.

Lincoln’s image during the Civil War

Depictions of Lincoln during his lifetime and during the war itself remind us that he was far from universally beloved: not only was Lincoln broadly despised by southern slaveholders who fomented secession after his election in 1860, Lincoln was also a focus of criticism by northerners. As a leader, he faced accusations of incompetence, of being both too radical and too conservative in his stance toward slavery, of being both too willing to sacrifice American lives in the pursuit of winning the Civil War and not willing enough. The only thing that his critics seemed to agree on was that he was an exceptionally ugly man, a fact that Lincoln himself made light of. “If I had two faces,” he joked in response to accusations of being deceitful, “would I be wearing this one?” [4]

During his more than four years in office, Lincoln and his supporters faced opposition from many groups in the North in addition to the South. There were Copperheads who sympathized with the slaveholding rebels and, on the other side, abolitionists who demanded immediate emancipation. The Civil War, a conflict northerners initially imagined would last mere months, stretched to four years and hundreds of thousands of casualties. As deaths mounted, contemporaries criticized Lincoln’s management of the war, and political cartoonists took aim at him.

Political cartoon critiquing Lincoln’s handling of the war. Joseph E. Baker, Columbia Demands Her Children! Boston , 1864, lithograph ( Library of Congress )

In this political cartoon from 1864, the figure of Columbia (an allegorical representation of the United States) wears ancient Roman garb, an American flag skirt, a shield on her back, and a crown inscribed “Liberty” as she accuses Lincoln of wasting the lives of U.S. soldiers. She points at Lincoln’s request for more troops, and demands, “Mr. Lincoln, give me back my 500,000 sons!” (the approximate number of men who had died in the war up until that point). Lincoln is portrayed as disheveled and grotesque, his leg thrown clumsily over a chair. A proclamation calling for more troops lies at his feet as he tries to distract Columbia by mumbling “Well the fact is—by the way that reminds me of a STORY!!!” The artist channeled the anger felt by many white northerners that their sacrifices had not translated into victory after three years of fighting, and that Lincoln had mismanaged the war. After Lincoln’s death in 1865, however, such unflattering depictions became extremely rare. This representation of Lincoln as incompetent contrasts with the god-like depictions made after his death, where he bestows liberty on enslaved people who appear unable to take action on their own behalf.

Apotheosis and idealization

In the years since his death, the instantly recognizable figure of Lincoln has become a symbol of emancipation, freedom, honesty, and civic virtue. Why and how did this transformation occur? First, Lincoln was assassinated, not only in the midst of the triumph of U.S. forces at the end of the Civil War but also on Good Friday, the day that Christians commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. He became not just a president but a martyr, ascending to a national pantheon along with George Washington .

John Sartain, after a design by W.H. Hermans, Abraham Lincoln, the Martyr, Victorious , 1866, engraving, 61 x 48 cm ( Library of Congress )

Lincoln was the first U.S. president to be assassinated, and Americans reacted to his death with shock. Soon after, an explosion of images of Lincoln appeared that mourned his death and depicted him as a martyr . Several illustrators imagined what happened to Lincoln’s spirit after he died, showing his apotheosis (transformation into a divine figure), such as John Sartain’s Abraham Lincoln, the Martyr, Victorious . In a long tradition of deification of leaders going back to ancient images of Roman emperors , Lincoln’s spirit ascends to heaven, where he is welcomed by George Washington and angels, some playing harps. One angel crowns him with laurels and holds a palm frond—both Roman symbols of victory (the palm was also a Christian symbol of eternal life and often depicted in images of martyred saints . The palm frond would also have reminded contemporary viewers of Jesus Christ , who was welcomed into Jerusalem with palms.

But the idealizing imagery of Lincoln in the wake of his assassination and the victory of the United States in the Civil War increasingly marginalized the most important participants in the saga of emancipation: the formerly enslaved people themselves. It also obscured Lincoln’s interactions with Indigenous people, whose suffering increased as a result of U.S. Army actions in the Civil War. Although Lincoln’s policies toward Indigenous peoples were not markedly different from those of earlier administrations, the Civil War’s impact on native communities was catastrophic. U.S. Army units forced thousands of Din é (Navajo) and Apaches in the southwest to march to a concentration camp in Bosque Redondo, New Mexico, where they were interned in conditions so unsanitary that more than a quarter of them died. The Third Colorado Cavalry attacked a settlement of Cheyenne and Arapaho women, children, and elderly people and murdered at least 150 of them in a rampage known as the Sand Creek massacre. Until recently, neither of these grim episodes has figured much in public histories of the Civil War.

Envisioning emancipation

In September 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that all enslaved people living in areas then in rebellion against the United States would become forever free on January 1, 1863. Artists hoping to commemorate this world-changing event faced a unique challenge: how could they depict emancipation? The Black people who were enslaved at 11:59 pm on December 31, 1862 would look exactly the same at 12:00am on January 1, 1863 when they became legally free. Was emancipation a process of subtraction—taking away chains, perhaps—or was it the addition of something new?

Abraham Lincoln may have signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but it was enslaved people themselves who made emancipation a reality, forcing the issue long before Lincoln accepted emancipation as a war goal. Many escaped at great personal risk, often making their way to U.S Army lines and serving in the war. In addition to providing military intelligence, many of these refugees went on to enlist to fight their former enslavers directly. One person wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, while millions more enacted it—often at great cost to themselves and their families.

P.S. Duval & Son after a drawing by R. Morris Swander , Emancipation Proclamations, Allegorical Portrait of Abraham Lincoln , Philadelphia: Swander Bishop & Co., 1865, engraving, 77.4 x 62.4 cm ( Brown University Library )

Visual representations of emancipation, however, focused on Lincoln’s role as author of the Proclamation, sidelining or erasing the role of Black people altogether. An 1865 engraving depicts Lincoln made of the words of the Emancipation Proclamation, with the portrait separating two vignettes below: one showing an enslaved man being lashed, another showing him being armed with a sword by Columbia (an allegorical representation of the United States) and sent off into battle with another Black man in an army uniform. Early images of emancipation, like these vignettes in the Emancipation Proclamations allegory, often portrayed formerly enslaved men joining the military and achieving full citizenship.

Dennis Malone Carter, Lincoln’s Drive Through Richmond , 1866, oil on canvas, 45 x 68 inches ( Chicago History Museum )

But others saw Lincoln as the divine deliverer, like Dennis Malone Carter’s 1866 painting Lincoln’s Drive Through Richmond. Here, the artist portrays Lincoln’s April 4, 1865 visit to the recently captured Confederate capital of Richmond, where he was greeted by grateful Black and white citizens. Sunlight falling on the wall behind Lincoln’s head gives the effect of a halo.

Not all attempts to commemorate emancipation in art focused on Lincoln alone. When formerly enslaved people began collecting money after Lincoln’s death to build a monument in his honor, some designs foregrounded the Black struggle for emancipation and equal citizenship.

Left: Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free , 1867, marble, 106 cm high (Howard University Gallery of Art; photo: Art History Project ); Right: Harriet Hosmer, early design for Freedmen’s Memorial to Lincoln, published in The Art-Journal, (January 1, 1868), London: Virtue & Co., p. 8.

Neoclassical sculptor Edmonia Lewis, an American sculptor who had both Black and Indigenous ancestry who worked in Rome, created an emancipation group called Forever Free soon after the conclusion of the Civil War. Lewis’s sculpture centers on the experience of a Black man and woman at the moment of emancipation. Overcoming the common visual trope of the kneeling slave begging for freedom seen in much abolitionist imagery , Lewis depicts a formerly enslaved man raising one arm with a broken shackle in a victorious attitude, his other hand resting on the shoulder of a kneeling woman whose own hands are clasped in prayer as if thanking God for the gift of freedom. With a protective, independent male figure and chaste, pious female figure, Lewis suggested that this newly free Black couple is finally able to participate in the family framework that was prized in the Victorian era. [5] Another proposed sculpture group, white female sculptor Harriet Hosmer’s unrealized designs for an emancipation memorial, featured a sculptural cycle of Black history with four standing male figures at each corner, representing kidnapping, enslavement, self-emancipation, and military service. [6] The figures are shown standing and appear as dignified and active agents in their own destinies.

Thomas Ball, Emancipation Memorial, 1876, bronze, Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C. (photo: Renée Ater)

Eliminating Black agency

But Hosmer’s design was ultimately discarded by the committee tasked with choosing the form of the monument. Despite being funded by the formerly enslaved, the committee sought no direction from their Black patrons, and ultimately chose to build a smaller group sculpted by American sculptor Thomas Ball. The Ball memorial group, which was erected in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C. (and whose copy was removed from view in Boston, as discussed earlier), showed Lincoln holding the Emancipation Proclamation and bestowing freedom on a semi-nude Black man crouched at his feet. Unlike Hosmer’s active, standing men, the Ball statue’s enslaved man is passive and diminished.

The statue implies that freedom was a gift given by Lincoln to the grateful enslaved. This is problematic in several ways: first, it eliminates the agency of Black people in obtaining their own freedom; second, it presents emancipation as a single event rather than an ongoing process of securing equality and citizenship; and third, it freezes the Black man in a powerless pose, forever locked in a state of subservience—while suggesting that he ought to be grateful for it.

This change in narratives—from Hosmer’s design foregrounding Black citizenship to Ball’s forever-kneeling passive recipient of freedom—tracked with the larger social changes in the period we call Reconstruction . By the time the monument was erected in 1876, the federal government and the Republican Party had abandoned their commitment to Black equality and allowed white supremacist state governments to retake power in the South. Frederick Douglass , who gave a speech at the Ball statue’s dedication in Washington, D.C., in 1876, reportedly disliked the pose of the kneeling figure, which did not impart a “manly attitude” indicative of freedom. [7] Douglass’s remarks laid bare the tenuous relationship between Black freedom and Abraham Lincoln, stating simply that Lincoln “was pre-eminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men . . . [but] we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.” [8]

Travis Blackbird, Ledger art on map , (and detail at right), 2017, ink on antique ledger, © Travis Blackbird used by permission

Lincoln’s image and Indigenous genocide

Although many artists have depicted Lincoln as a Christ-like figure, a work of contemporary ledger art by Travis Blackbird (Omaha/Oglala Lakota) includes an image of Lincoln on a map of western states, atop the state of Minnesota. Lincoln’s stance, with his arms outstretched, ironically mimics Christ on the cross or the Virgin Misericordia , who protects the blessed beneath her cloak. In 1862, Dakotas were starving in Minnesota after white settlers pushed them off their lands and the U.S. government failed to provide the food and money it had promised in earlier treaties. A faction of Dakota men attacked the reservation administration building where unscrupulous government agents had broken the terms of the treaty by refusing to sell them food, and the uprising escalated into all-out warfare. Throughout August and September of that year, Minnesota infantry regiments recruited for the U.S. Army turned their sights on the Dakota forces. After they were defeated at the Battle of Wood Lake in late September, the Dakotas were subjected to military trials that resulted in sentencing more than 300 men to death. Abraham Lincoln commuted the sentences of most but signed an order to execute 38 Dakota men, which was the largest mass execution in U.S. history. [9]

Blackbird wrestles with this legacy by showing 38 hanged Dakota men dangling from Lincoln’s arms: Lincoln’s quasi-religious status has condemned, rather than saved these men. Blackbird positions Lincoln among other symbols of white incursion into Indigenous land, with surveyors and a covered wagon suggesting the influx of white settlers after Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862. At the bottom right, a figure of Columbia drawn from John Gast’s painting American Progress symbolizes Manifest Destiny, the imperialist idea that white Americans were destined to occupy North America from Atlantic to Pacific, which spurred westward expansion and Indigenous genocide.

The Civil War was caused, in part, by westward expansion—or, more precisely, by the conflict over the future of slavery in the West . But neither white northerners or southerners envisioned a place for Indigenous people in the lands they intended to possess. For decades, U.S. history books taught the Civil War and westward expansion after the war as separate units, subtly signaling that the two topics are unrelated. But in the last decade, scholars have emphasized the connections between the war (that was largely fought in the South) and the conflict between Indigenous people and white settlers in the West. [10]

Mathew Brady, Delegation of Plains peoples to the White House, 1863, photograph ( White House )

Lincoln’s policy proposals were based around reserving the West for individual white farmers to counteract the influence of slaveholders. In office, he signed The Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act , both signature policies of Lincoln’s administration. These acts gave Indigenous lands to white settlers and railroad companies and pushed Plains peoples onto reservations . Although Lincoln invited a delegation of Plains peoples to the White House in 1863—whom he urged not to ally with Confederates, and who in turn urged him to honor land treaties —he continued ongoing U.S. government efforts to force Indigenous people onto reservations. There was no equivalent to the Emancipation Proclamation for Indigenous peoples.

Lincoln’s legacy

Although there is much to celebrate in Lincoln’s legacy, there’s also much to critique. Looking beyond an idealized image of Lincoln helps us to see the past more clearly and to confront the legacy of the Civil War in all its complexity: a war of freedom, but one with catastrophic effects on Indigenous people. How the actions of U.S. forces have been remembered must also be viewed anew: just as white southerners championed a highly subjective and damaging narrative of the war’s causes and consequences, white northerners’ story of victory and emancipation has left out the contributions of Black Americans and erased Indigenous suffering at the hands of the army.

[1] “ The Idiotic Removal of a Lincoln Statue ,” Denver Gazette, January 4, 2021 . Note that although formerly enslaved people contributed to financing the Ball Lincoln statue, there were many entities involved in raising money for its construction, and Black donors or representatives had no say in the statue’s design. See Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 90–94.

[2] Christina Zdanowicz and Sahar Akbarzai, “ Boston removes statue of former slave kneeling before President Lincoln after 141 years, ” CNN.com, December 29, 2020.

[3] For more on how white northerners crafted Civil War memory, see David Blythe, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

[4] Lincoln supposedly made this joke during the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858.

[5] See Kirsten Pai Buick, Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 54.

[6] Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves , pp. 89–98.

[7] Freeman H. M. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture (Washington, D.C.: Murray Brothers Printing Company, 1916), pp. 198–99.

[8] Oration delivered by Frederick Douglass at the Unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, 1876.

[9] For more information on the Dakota War, see “ The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 ” at the Minnesota Historical Society.

[10] For a review essay on recent scholarship on the West in the Civil War, see Stacey L. Smith, “Beyond North and South: Putting the West in the Civil War and Reconstruction,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4. (December 2016): pp. 566–91.

Additional resources

Explore Lincoln images and artifacts in the Library of Congress.

Learn more about Ledger Drawings at the Smithsonian.

Browse the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian.

Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

See more works of art by Edmonia Lewis at Google Arts and Culture.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Thomas Hardy — Depiction Of War In Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Man He Killed’

Depiction of War in Thomas Hardy’s 'The Man He Killed'

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Artists and War Art by Margaret George , Victoria Young LAST REVIEWED: 29 July 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 29 July 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791279-0195

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Analysis of Stanza 1: Exhaustion and Misery

Description of the soldiers’ physical appearance

Exploration of the soldiers’ emotional state

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Desire for death

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Soldiers appearing drugged and drained

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Comparison of the dying man’s struggle to a nightmare

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Owen’s address to war journalist Jessie Pope

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Condemnation of the glorification of war and the nobility of dying for one’s country

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