Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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I have always been attracted to war poetry. Wars have historically produced some exceptional poetry and verses that continue to be recited for generations later. My first introduction to war poetry was during my university years when one of my lecturers was Bernard Spencer, a poet in his own right. As part of the poetry class he selected some poems by two World War I poets, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

I shall always remember Owen's poem "Strange Meeting" in which an English soldier and a German one meet after their death. The poem is often quoted as an anti-war manifesto. I cannot quote the whole poem, but some of its lines sand out and have been kept in my memory. Owen is addressing the German soldier:

"'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'

'None,' said the other, 'save the undone years,

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,

Was my life also;....

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in the dark; for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now.'"

A turning point in the story of war poetry came with the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936. Writers from all over the world, but specifically from England and America, were filled with passion and ready to fight for their ideas, though their weapons were notebooks, battered typewriters and cumbersome cameras, writes Giles Tremtelt in the Guardian Weekly. He writes from Madrid to cover the opening of an exhibition to commemorate Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and a number of other writers and journalists.

I remember Bernard Spencer lecturing us about what he called "fascism's first big military outing and a curtain raiser of" World War II. Though he did not take part in the war, he knew some of the English writers and poets who did, such as WH Auden who wrote poems for the Republican cause. Not all the writers, of course, were pro-Republican. George Orwell was, and so was Arthur Koestler who was locked up by Franco's supporters. The Spanish Civil War was, possibly, the first instance to underline the role of writers and intellectuals in general as spearheads of political involvement.

Lastly we come to World War II poets. While the poets of World War I and the Spanish Civil War were recognised and well-known poets, those who wrote poetry during World War II were not. Because a decisive war was fought in Egypt, most, if not all, the poetry of that war was produced on its soil. CS Fraser, a famous English poet, once gave me his insights into poetry produced in the Middle East war theatre. "The poetry of the Middle East theatre", he said, "may seem to divide itself into those with battle experience and those rotting gently on the lines of communication. More importantly perhaps, than the variousness of the experience is the variousness of the sensibilities, talents and education of the contributors. There were the 'art' poets for whom the war and the army were merely a phase of a larger career; then the educated voices of those who were moved under the pressures of exile and acute, unfamiliar experience, to a poetry of occasion, and, finally, the record of the almost inarticulate, the artless, the oral, those blunt often poignant songs of complaint or of patriotism". Fraser summed it beautifully when he wrote in a preface for Return to Oasis, the second volume after Oasis (a Second World War anthology): "A war is one of the few periods in English history, in this century, when a large number of people who might not otherwise think of themselves as poets feel a need to write poetry."