War Poetry

[Mirza Ghalib]

War poetry

Mir Adnan Aziz
Saturday, July 21, 2012

The Taliban have created pandemonium in certain British circles. The source is a 247 page book titled ‘Poetry of the Taliban’. Edited by Alex Strick and Felix Kuehn the book has, as expected, evoked diverse reactions. Colonel Richard Kemp, a former British commander in Afghanistan, terms the book ‘self-justifying propaganda’. He says ‘What we need to remember is that these are fascist, murdering thugs’. Some have likened it to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer for the New Yorker, asserts otherwise. According to him the book is about ‘warriors who have wounded hearts, lyrical souls and a passionate love of language’. CJ Chivers writes in a New York Times blog that the poetry is ‘a way of better understanding the Taliban and Afghanistan, it helps humanize the Taliban not portraying them as murderous savages that the West has done’.

Nawa Jan Baheer’s ‘The waiting bullet’ is about a boy preparing to leave his house. Everything he does leads to the inevitable tragic end, his death, which awaits the child as soon as he steps out of his house. Khepulwaak’s ‘On Eid’, is about the dread not the festivities of Eid in Afghanistan. It reads: ‘At your Christmas, Bagram is alit and bright - On my Eid, even the rays of the sun are dead - Suddenly at midnight, your bombs bring the light’.

The works of poet and essayist Osip Mandelshtam were some of the greatest to emerge from the Soviet gulags. ‘Poems From Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak’ is the story of the 774 detainees, most of them held illegally without charge, evidence or trial. The book’s editor is Marc Falkoff, a law professor at Northern Illinois University of Law. Jeffrey Gordon, Pentagon’s chief press officer declared the poetry, dubbed as ‘Gitmo poetry’, a ‘tool that the detainees were using in a battle against Western democracies’! Yet denying the Holocaust is a punishable crime!

Wars have always been brutal events wreaking death and agony. Poetry, since ancient times, has been used to glorify its heroic deeds. It has also been used as a medium to portray the horrors within. Tyrtaeus’s 7th century poems were recited for centuries by Spartans. Furius Bibaculus, an officer in Caesar’s army, wrote an epic on the Gallic Wars. The Iliad, Homer’s epic poem, is about the ten year siege of Troy during the Trojan War and Achilles’ atrocities on the living and dead.

Soldiers and civilians alike are expected to endure scenes of violence and suffering and remain indifferent. Some simply cannot. Wars and battle-fields were glorified by poets who had never seen or felt the violent and brutalizing events first hand. Yeats told the playwright Sean O’Casey, ‘you are not interested in the Great War; you never stood on its battlefields or walked its hospitals, so write out of your own opinions’. It was only after the First World War, that War poetry emerged as an influencing part of the English lexicon. It depicted in stark detail the terror, horror, brutality and above all the futility of war.

Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Keith Douglas achieved great fame as war poets. Douglass died in the 1944 Allied invasion of Normandy. Owen and Sassoon saw action in the First World War. Both were decorated for bravery. It was at the Craiglockhart War Hospital that Sassoon met Owen. The Hospital was a facility where ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers were treated for psychological trauma. Owen loved poetry and Sassoon encouraged him to write about the horrors of war. Critics term Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est published in 1921 as the greatest war poem ever. On November 4, 1918, Owen was killed in action at the Battle of Sambre, France.

Sassoon is best remembered for his angry and compassionate poems of the War depicting the horror and brutality of trench warfare. He contemptuously satirized generals and politicians who brought about the same. He wrote a letter To the War Department titled ‘Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration’ Refusing to fight any more, he wrote: ‘I believe that this War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. This War, which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.’ Bertrand Russell’s efforts led to the letter being read in the British House of Commons.

Rudyard Kipling was another famous war-poet. His early years were devoted to British imperialism. His poem, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, was about British racial superiority and their ‘responsibility of civilizing the savages’. At the outbreak of the World War Kipling’s son, John, failed to clear the army medical examination because of poor eye-sight. Kipling, the world’s then youngest Nobel literary laureate was a celebrity. He was also a friend of Lord Roberts, commander-in-chief of the British Army and colonel of the Irish Guards. Using his status Kipling ensured that his son got commission in the Irish Guards.

The Battle of Loos was a major Allied offensive against the Germans on the Western Front. It also saw the British use 140 tons of poison Chlorine gas. Amongst those killed in action, was Second Lieutenant John Kipling. The remains of Kipling’s ‘dear boy’ were not officially discovered until 1992. His death left Rudyard Kipling a devastated man. In his Epitaphs of the War, a couplet reads: ‘If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied’. He also wrote: ‘To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes, to be cindered by fires - To be senselessly tossed and re-tossed in stale mutilation - From crater to crater, for this we shall take expiation - But who shall return us our children’?

The Western world, enveloped in Kipling’s empire and the white man’s burden mindset wage wars believing they are ordained to be masters of civilization. The Crimean War alone saw more than one million causalities. It was a war where allied soldiers obeyed commands that sent them to their deaths at the Battle of Balaclava. Depicted valiantly by Tennyson in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, the poem was written in response to a gory account of the battle in a Times newspaper article. Owen and Sassoon had borne the nightmare of the trenches; Tennyson never did.

Over 98 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives during the two World Wars. At the end of the millennium, wars have taken over 215 million lives. War poetry should not be judged by aesthetics and poetic intricacies. As Owen said, ‘all a poet can do today is warn; that is why the true poet must be truthful’. The raw emotion, anguish and pain portrayed in war poetry are its essential soul.

The war Afghanistan faces today is as unjust as it is brutal. Millions have lost their lives in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. The mantra of glorifying and romanticizing the Taliban is as true as justifying the inhumanity of unjust wars and genocidal occupations. Herodotus said: ‘In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons’. Nothing could be more agonizingly true. The insanity of today’s wars and occupations echo Kipling’s haunting question brought about only by his own devastating loss: ‘Who shall return us our children’?

The writer is a freelance contributor. Email: miradnanaziz@gmail.com

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(All human beings with any sense must be anti-war.)