Classics and Modern War

Elizabeth Vandiver, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in BritishPoetry of the Great War, ser. Classical Presences (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2010), XX + 455 pp.

This splendid book is a valuable and substantial addition to Oxford’s ‘Classi-cal Presences’ series. A path-breaking work, scrupulously scholarly yet veryreadable, it adroitly combines two overlapping areas of enquiry, Great WarLiterature and Classical Reception, and it throws new light on both while pro-viding stimulus for further research. We have had half a century of scholar-ship and criticism on the literature of the Great War, starting with D.E.S.Welland’s critical study of Wilfred Owen (1960) and Bernard Bergonzi’s He-roes’ Twilight (1965) and continuing in major works such as Paul Fussell’s TheGreat War and Modern Memory (1975). The literary reputations of iconoclasticwar-poets such as Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are now secure. But Profes-sor Vandiver is aware of the distortions caused by the taste for iconoclasmand distaste for romantic heroics, stemming in part from C.E. Montague’spostwar Disenchantment (1922), although this is not mentioned, and largelydirected against the poetry and the romantic personal myth of Rupert Brooke.Modern readers may pay too much attention to the repudiation of war,summed up in Owen’s familiar indictment of ‘The old Lie: Dulce et decorumest / Pro patria mori.’

If Horace’s famous line (Odes 3.2.13), quoted on innumerable war me-morials, fails to tell the whole truth about war and the complexities of theGreat War the same has to be said about Owen’s savage attack on it. Not allthe combatants felt like Owen or Siegfried Sassoon and not all the soldier-poets wrote like them. To read the war only through the work of Sassoon isto misread it. Professor Vandiver’s careful readings are sensitive to contextand cultural history as well as to poetry. Noting the importance to her theme

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 18, No. 4, December 2011, pp. 593-598

Classics and Modern War

DOI 10.1007/s12138-011-0283-y

.

594 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / December 2011

of the epitaphs and fragments of Simonides, as well as the war poetry ofHomer and Virgil, she begins by discussing two very short poems, H.W. Gar-rod’s ‘Neuve Chapelle’ and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Common Form’, both ofwhich are loosely modelled on Simonides’ terse epitaph for the Spartan deadat Thermopylae (Diehl no.92), neatly translated as:

Tell them in Lakedaimon, passer by, That here obedient to their word we lie.1

Taken in isolation, each of these modern poems, like their Greek original,could be misread as ‘Sassoonish’ indictments of war. Read in context, whichshe proceeds to do, both Garrod’s and Kipling’s lines turn out to mean almostthe opposite: they are grim commemorations of the war-dead laced with bit-terness not against the war as such but against the attitudes and evasions ofpoliticians and survivors at home. Garrod’s poem was included in a collec-tion entitled Worms and Epitaphs (1919): something of the complexity of his at-titude to war can be seen in his Shakespearean title, invoking Richard II’ssombrely realistic response to disastrous war news: ‘of comfort no man speak:/ Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs.’ (Richard II 3.2.145)

Alert to complexity, to the dangers of misreading, and to the risks of at-tending only to the informal canon of war-poetry that flatters modern pre-conceptions and expectations, Professor Vandiver has scrupulously identifiedand listened to many different voices and shows how classical allusion andappropriation help to express and dignify many different attitudes to war.Homeric conflict around Troy and Virgilian conflict in Latium were heroicallybrutal, possible models for describing some of the hand-to-hand fighting onthe western front, but there is space for the pity of war and tears at the heartof things in the Iliad and the Aeneid as well as in Wilfred Owen. As ProfessorVandiver demonstrates, Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ incorporates both a classi-cal katabasis, a visit to the place of the dead, and a combination of thepoignantly contrasting Homeric images of blood-clogged chariot wheels andthe sweet wells or basins the women used for washing when Troy was atpeace. Elsewhere she notes that it was tempting for poets to make the Caesarwho fought in Gaul a type of the Kaiser, and to make the tribes Caesar foughtagainst – including the Belgae – stand for the invaded peoples of France andBelgium, but Caesar could also be made to stand for that other iconic militaryhero Lord Kitchener. Two poems published in 1915, both by the same poet(Canon H.D. Rawnsley), invoked ancient Rome as representing both Germanaggression and the patriotic armed resistance of the French. It becomes abun-dantly clear throughout the book that in wartime, as at other times, the mat-ter of Rome, and the classical tradition more generally, did not represent acoherent and unified ideology, let alone an aspect of the civilization the troopsmight think they were fighting for, but an expressive resource, a language, ca-pable of articulating a wide range of different meanings.

There are more specific lessons in the book for students of the classical tra-dition. Professor Vandiver alerts us to different modes of access to and un-derstanding of classical materials and provides extremely useful

1. Attributed to ‘various hands’, in T.F. Higham and C.M. Bowra, eds, The OxfordBook of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), p.237.

Review Articles 595

documentation. There is an excellent chapter on ‘Classics and Public-SchoolCulture’ and another on ‘Middle- and Working-class Classics’ which drawattention to the social range of the soldier-poets and the different modes andlevels of classical influence helping to shape their work. At one extreme therewere the privileged members of the officer-class, the classically-educated pub-lic-school men who might or might not have had time to complete their clas-sical studies at Oxford or Cambridge. Harold Macmillan, British PrimeMinister in the 1960s, was ‘sent down by the Kaiser’, as he put it, volunteer-ing for war service in a Guards regiment before he had completed his degreeat Balliol. Seriously wounded and trapped in a shell-hole, he consoled him-self by reading his pocket copy of the Prometheus Vinctus of Aeschylus, whichhad its own share of cataclysmic violence and suffering. Another Balliol man,Patrick Shaw-Stewart, whose quasi-Homeric poem from the Dardanelles cam-paign, invoking the heroic Achilles, supplies the title of this book, had been asuperb classicist at Eton and Oxford, where he went on to become a Fellow ofAll Souls. He alludes to Troy-talk in the Agamemnon as well as to the Iliad inhis own poem. He knew enough about ancient history and archaeology aswell as about Homer to be keenly aware that the Trojan War had been foughtclose to where he and Rupert Brooke were based while serving with the HoodNaval Battalion of the Royal Naval Division. Scholarly even in uniform, hewrote to his friend and biographer Ronald Knox, another product of Eton andOxford, to ask for a map of the region with the Homeric names, and he care-fully perused Walter Leaf’s recent Homer and History (1915).

At the other end of the spectrum there were the private soldiers and sol-dier-poets such as Isaac Rosenberg with little formal education and no Greekor Latin. Yet some at least had a sense of classical culture acquired throughtranslations or through heroic poetry such as Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome.Another possibility, which calls for further investigation, is the influence ofthe Elgin Marbles in the British Museum which had fascinated John Keats, orclassical paintings by Alma Tadema or Jacques-Louis David, or other visualsources such as John Flaxman’s Homeric illustrations, mentioned here as anearly influence on Compton Mackenzie, though Mackenzie had Greek as well.

It is particularly useful to be reminded of how even before 1914 popularpoems such as Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitai Lampada’, with its Lucretian title, orhis ‘Clifton Chapel’ with its Latin epitaph for those who had died on remotefrontiers, had linked public school classics, sporting manliness and playingthe game with the dauntless service of nation and empire, even when ‘TheGatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead’. There were other similarly influen-tial texts not mentioned here, notably some of the poems in W.E. Henley’svery popular anthology for schoolboys Lyra Heroica (1891), which assembledstirring and sometimes classically-influenced passages ranging from Shake-speare to Kipling to instil proper patriotic feeling into the young, some ofwhom might go on to serve in imperial wars, some of whom would fight inthe Great War. ‘Sacrifice’, which Professor Vandiver discusses in a sub-chap-ter on ‘The School of Sacrifice’, was a key theme in the rhetoric of patriotismand war. In September 1914 the great political orator David Lloyd George,not yet Prime Minister, had tried to give his audience a vision of ‘the greateverlasting things that matter for a nation – the great peaks we had forgot-ten,’ including ‘clad in glittering white, the great pinnacle of Sacrifice, point-


ing like a rugged finger to Heaven.’2 Under the title of ‘Sacrifice’ Henley hadincluded an extract from Walter Savage Landor’s Hellenics on the death ofIphigenia. Readers of Landor or of Lyra Heroica could know about Iphigenia’sheroic sacrifice without needing to know anything about the classical sourcessuch as Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis.

This draws attention to one of the difficulties in identifying a specificallyclassical strand in any body of poetry. The classical component may be me-diated and indirect. There are often other strands of influence as well, par-ticularly earlier English poetry. This is not just a matter of Shakespeare orMilton in epic mode: the classically-nurtured Swinburne is an under-ac-knowledged influence on Great War poetry, and classical and Christian ele-ments may be mingled as they are in David Jones and Wilfred Owen andmany other soldier-poets. As Professor Vandiver points out, Owen’s poem‘Arms and the Boy’ could refer ironically to the first line of the Aeneid but itcould also refer to George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man (1894) whichin its turn alludes sardonically to the opening line of Dryden’s translation ofthe Aeneid. In Edmund Blunden’s poem ‘Vlamertinghe: Passing the Chateau,July 1917’, not discussed in this book, the theme of sacrifice in war is ap-proached not through Homer or Simonides but by alluding to Keats’s invo-cation of ritual animal sacrifice in classical times in ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’:

‘And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed’ –But we are coming to the sacrifice.Must those have flowers who are not yet gone West?3

The inescapable theme of sacrifice recalls not just Euripides’ Iphigenia butSophocles’ Antigone and other heroic but tragic figures, and it seems morethan likely that awareness of Greek tragedy lies somewhere behind many ofthe poetic treatments of life and death in the front line, particularly where warhad brought disenchantment with pious platitudes. While bloodshed, seen asblood-sacrifice, could attract the ennobling imagery of martyrdom and evencrucifixion from the Christian tradition, disenchanted nineteenth-centurywriters from Shelley to Swinburne and Hardy had preferred to invoke the lessconsoling paganism of ancient Greece and of Greek tragedy. Shelleyan Pla-tonism of the kind invoked in ‘Adonais’ could provide the poets with a kindof non-corporeal pantheistic version of survival after death, an alternative tothe sure and certain hope of the resurrection in Christian tradition, as Profes-sor Vandiver has noted. But she has no space to consider the possible role ofGreek tragedy in Great War poetry: this is an intriguing aspect of the topicwhich still needs to be explored.

There is no space for pastoral either. One might ask why should therebe, since pastoral can have little to do with war. But pastoral continuities areat risk in wartime, and the stark contrast between the world of battle and thepeaceful countryside is as old as the Homeric simile. English landscapes con-tributed to the patriotic love of England and the sense that there was some-

2. Quoted in Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: the Great War and the Birth of the Mod-ern Age (London: Black Swan, 1990), p.189.

3. Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982),p.256

Review Articles 597

thing worth fighting for. The remembered beauty of English fields, seen per-haps for the last time in the splendid summer of 1914, was a recurring themein war poetry. Even war-scarred France had Arcadian possibilities. EdmundBlunden was a countryman from Kent before he was a soldier serving with theRoyal Sussex Regiment, and in many of his war-poems cherry-clusters, Frenchapple orchards, trees in blossom, the hum of bees and the rosy-fingered dawnsof Homeric convention accompany and sometimes help to neutralise the im-agery of conflict, blood, barbed wire and shattered trees.

There is another book to be written about the influence and mediatingrole of A.E. Housman, classical scholar and poet of doomed youth. It is in-teresting that Patrick Shaw-Stewart wrote his poem on Achilles on a back fly-leaf of a copy of The Shropshire Lad. Among the many adaptations of Si-monides on the dead at Thermopylae one should not perhaps overlook Hous-man’s own lines, sardonic yet moving:

Here dead lie we because we did not chooseTo live and shame the land from which we sprung.

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;But young men think it is, and we were young.4

What about the other side? Were there German soldier-poets writing between1914 and 1918 who drew on the classical tradition? After all, Goethe had writ-ten about Iphigenia and Nietzsche had written about Theognis. It would beinteresting to know. It is strange to reflect that it was largely German schol-arship, particularly the work of editors such as Wilhelm Theodor Bergk in thenumerous editions of Poetae Lyrici Graeci, first published in Leipzig in 1843,that had elucidated much of the Greek poetry which inspired the British sol-dier-poets. German pioneers had made possible convenient anthologies suchas J.W. Mackail’s Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (3rd edition 1911), fre-quently cited by Professor Vandiver, and Greek Melic Poets (1900), edited byHerbert Weir Smyth (Ph.D. Göttingen).

Oxford classical dons, if not necessarily their pupils, were expected to befamiliar with German scholarship. Maurice Bowra, Fellow of Wadham, andT.F. (‘Tommy’) Higham, Fellow of Trinity, leading classical tutors in the inter-war years, had both served in the Great War, Bowra with the Royal Field Ar-tillery and Higham with the 9th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire LightInfantry. Bowra at least nearly lost his life on two occasions, once when he wasburied alive at the battle of Cambrai. Their postwar engagements with Greekpoetry led eventually to their involvement both with the Oxford Book of GreekVerse (1930) and its companion volume the Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Trans-lation (1938) which they edited together, supplying some of the translationsthemselves but also using the work of other classicists such as A.E. Housman,H.W. Garrod, Hugh Macnaghten and J.W. Mackail, all mentioned by Profes-sor Vandiver. This was in a sense their delayed classical war-book, contain-ing amidst much else not only Homeric set pieces such as the parting ofHector from Andromache and their little son Astyanax (Iliad VI) but a gener-ous selection of epitaphs from Simonides and warlike material from Callinus

4. A.E. Housman, More Poems (1936), included in Brian Gardner, ed., Up the Line toDeath: the War Poets 1914-1918, revised ed. (London: Methuen, 1976), p.149.


and Tyrtaeus. Bowra’s Early Greek Elegists (1935) had devoted one chapter outof six to Simonides and another to Tyrtaeus. Bowra’s biographer notes histacit approval of Tyrtaeus’ ‘grim and self-denying’ attitude to pain that mustbe endured and cowardice that must be avoided.5 It is easy to forget that,while Horace’s dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is more familiar than any-thing in Greek, the sentiment is not original to him: it is often traced to a war-song of Tyrtaeus (Diehl 6-7) which the ex-soldier Higham translated:

Noble is he who falls in front of battlebravely fighting for his native land. 6

Much later, in a published lecture on Poetry and the First World War (1961),Bowra wrote that ‘There is no standard reaction to war: each man takes whatcomes, as it comes, in his own way.’ 7 It is one of the responsibilities of litera-ture, ancient and modern, not just to generalise but to capture and express in-dividual responses, particularly, perhaps, under extreme conditions. ProfessorVandiver’s impressive study illuminates this function of literature and showsus how it was somehow possible in different ways to hear Homer on Hill 60and Simonides at the Somme.

Norman VanceSchool of English

University of Sussex

5. Leslie Mitchell, Maurice Bowra: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp.36-9.

6. The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (above, n. 1), p.181.7. C.M. Bowra, Poetry and the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p.15.

Documents

Classics and Modern War