Words that Last: Passages from War Literature to Read in Remembrance
The poppies that have filled the moat at the Tower of London this autumn have given London a dramatic focus for its commemoration of the centenary of World War I. The vision of bright red flowers filling the once green and empty moat soothes as it shocks. Sometimes we need a visual image to make us look and feel rather than think and analyze.
But when words get it right, they can do just the same, if not more, mimicking and remedying the grief of both author and reader.
So, on Remembrance Sunday, here are some of the words that last, from authors with varying experiences and distances from the front line, but connected in their ability to describe something universal…
If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
The Soldier, 1914, Rupert Brooke
As many of the poems that came out of the war years, the group of sonnets that Rupert Brooke named 1914, in which this “The Soldier” forms the final part, shows the part patriotism played in the country’s coping during the war years. No matter what the soldier will face, his Englishness, and his memories of his beloved home, cannot be beaten. A year later, Brooke would die on his way to serve at Gallipoli, giving the poem a prophetic power.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway produces many of his most famous quotes about war in this novel. War is the constant fear that forms the background of the narrator’s love affair with his nurse Catherine. He attempts again and again to define things like courage and fear, but in the end, even the concisest phrases submit to depicting the climactic event of Catherine’s tragic labor, which seems to tell us more about the wartime state of mind than any talk about courage could.
You tentatively peek up, wondering if it is the end. Then you look at the other men, reading your own caved-in belly deep in their eyes. The fright dies the same way novocaine wears off in the dentist’s chair. You promise, almost moving your lips, to do better next time; that by itself is a kind of courage.
If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O’Brien
This novel is full of energy, the shouts and songs of troops in Vietnam, struggling with the rightness and wrongness of their war, but every so often it describes the unadulterated heart of the soldiers’ fears, like this passage, which finds the words to describe the particular experience of always almost-dying.
All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
The characters in John Knowles novel are boys at boarding school when the war begins, and just as graduation would have threatened the generations before and after them, graduation into military service looms at the end of their idyllic school days. This is one of the passages that seems to elucidate everything the book is trying to show, and reminds us how close to boyhood the armies of the World Wars were.
“The news makes me sick,” Freddy said quietly. He put a hand to his stomach.
“You know when I get old,” Carole said, “I’m going to overdress. I think old age is such a good excuse for overdressing.”
“We’ll all spend the rest of our lives in uniform,” Freddy said.
“I wish Helen Hughes were here,” old Mrs. Towle said.
I’m Going to Asia, John Cheever
This little story was published by Harper’s Bazaar in 1941 and in the O. Henry Prize Stories anthology of the same year. The anthology is a symbol of the 1941 state of mind, with many of the chosen stories being edged and under-toned with fear of wartime. Here, the many generations of the Towle family are assembled in their holiday home and try to keep up the normal superficiality of their lives.
“He is dead,” said Neville. “He fell. His horse tripped. He was thrown. The sails of the world have swung round and caught me on the head. All is over. The lights of the world have gone out. There stands the tree which I cannot pass.”
The Waves, Virginia Woolf
Amidst the expansive, almost oppressively rich prose of The Waves, in which six friends from childhood grow up and narrate the changes they’ve gone through each time they reunite, war casts an increasingly powerful shadow. In this crucial chapter of the book, roughly in the middle, Neville narrates the most drastic moment of change; for the first time, they have lost one of their group. The very world around them has transformed.
Then, suddenly, almost ecstatically, he felt sleepy.
You take a really sleepy man, Esme, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac- with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.
To Esme With Love and Squalor, J.D. Salinger
This passage comes at the end of Salinger’s story of a soldier who meets a young girl called Esme while on leave who becomes his devoted pen pal. It is through Esme’s strangely wise words and kindness that the soldier manages to see the light beyond his “battle fatigue,” which we come to realize is what we’d know call post-traumatic stress disorder.
And if your reading list isn’t quite long enough this week, take a look at Towerbabel’s previous post on unusual visions of war, or our Outsiders series.
Image: Flanders by Steve Maskell
