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War and Peace in British
LiteratureBritish Literature
Introduction
War and peace wrestle with one another
throughout the pages of human history. If war
is broadly defined as armed conflict between two
conflicting factions, states, or tribes, then one
would have to say that war has always been a
part of human experience and is perhaps even a
defining characteristic of human beings.
Many people have pointed out that peace
presents special difficulties. It is harder to define
than war and it is more difficult to cultivate and
maintain. Aside from being the absence of war,
peace is often understood to include the stable
presence of law, order, and justice. Law, for
instance, is the product of centuries of patient
human experience gained throughout the history
of a given society. Justice is the fruit of reflection
on the way humans relate to one another in
society. A learned sense of justice cannot be
acquired overnight. Social order follows from
understanding, specifically from an awarenessthat reliable, established patterns of behavior
are useful to both individuals and societies.
British literature begins in the twelfth cen-
tury and provides a telling record of Englands
relationship with both war and peace. Early
British texts praise war and the warriors battle
prowess, citing it as an opportunity to show
greatness and valor. This attitude was dominant
through the late nineteenth century, when
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technological advances changed the way war
could be conducted, and therefore, how indivi-
duals responded to war. Imperialistic struggles,
the world wars, and later wars in Vietnam and
Iraq further distanced British literature from its
earlier romantic leanings. Questions about the
causes of war, the sacrifices required, and theend result of war have replaced visions of valor,
bravery, and wartime adventures. The desire for
peace has become as important to British war
literature as war itself.
Premodern Britain
British literature has roots in the early Middle
Ages, the period between the breakdown of the
Roman Empire and the Renaissance. Available
sources of information about this period, from
the fifth century A.D. to the fifteenth century, are
often hard to interpret. They are written in a
premodern form of English, and the cultures
represented in the works are frequently far
removed from modern society.
The first major work of British literature
was Beowulf. This poem is thought to have
been composed in the eighth century A.D., but
nothing is known of its author, and little is
known about how it was written down and
passed from generation to generation. The
poem was probably recorded in something simi-
lar to its present form shortly after 1100 A.D.
The setting of the poem is the northernEurope of Anglo-Saxon, or pre-British,
England. Warfare, especially on the sea, was a
common fact of life. The feudal kingdoms of
Denmark, Norway, and Anglo-Saxon England
struggled to extend and consolidate their terri-
tories. They fought sea battle after sea battle and
undertook expeditions as far as to the eastern
coast of Nova Scotia in North America.
It is telling that the subject of the first piece
of British literature is a warrior hero. Beowulf,
with its glorification of wartime heroism, leader-
ship, and manly courage became the template
for many subsequent British war tales.
Hrothgar, the king in Beowulf, faces a grotesque
monster, Grendel, who is destroying houses and
people. Beowulf is from a different tribal group;
the poem is largely concerned with his efforts to
free Hrothgars kingdom of Grendel and defend
it against Grendels equally terrible mother.
After defeating Grendel, Beowulf is celebrated
as a hero; he became an example of the ideal
warrior for future British tales of war: He was
adventurer most famous, far and wide through
the nations, for deeds of courage . . . his strength
and his courage.
In the middle of the tenth century, the Battle
of Malden became the topic of a major Anglo-
Saxon poem. This poem, like Beowulf, was satu-
rated with military feats, and drew on inherentlypoetic raw material: a dramatic battle fought in
991 among the wheat fields of Essex, an English
county. The attackers were led by the Viking
raider Olaf Tryggvasson with some three thou-
sand fighters. The Vikings made their camp on
an island on the north side of an estuary, while
the leader of the Anglo-Saxon force took a posi-
tion at high tide on the south side of the estuary.
A narrow causeway joined the two sides, and the
Anglo-Saxons would not permit the invaders to
cross to the mainland. The leader of the Anglo-
Saxons eventually agreed to the Vikings request
that they be allowed to cross the causeway and
fight on equal terms. A great battle ensued on
level ground, and the Anglo-Saxons were
defeated. Even though the Anglo-Saxons fought
to the death, the Vikings triumphed.
The Battle of Malden, like the seafaring con-
flicts that form the backdrop to Beowulf, estab-
lished a quarrelsome model for the literature of
the British Isles. In this manner, British culture
was formed from conflict. The decisive influence
of war emerges most clearly in the Battle of
Hastings in 1066, in which the early outline of
modern British culture was formed. At that bat-
tle, the Norman French army, under William the
Conqueror, defeated the Danish/Anglo-Saxon
forces and a French king took over the rule of
the British Isles. It was the last time that an
enemy force would successfully invade Britain.
It was also the plateau on which the classical
British monarchy would establish itself, with all
its dynastic struggles. From that point on, the
English language would move toward its blend
of French/Latin with Anglo-Saxon elements,
initiating the development of what has become
modern English.
Renaissance
Over four hundred years passed between the
Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the next major
war-related text in British literature, Sir Thomas
Malorys Le Morte dArthur (1485). During that
time, Britain was gradually moving toward the
increasingly centralized rule of monarchy and
church, and moving away from feudal
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institutions loosely scattered over the Isles, in
which lords owned fiefs of land that they then
loaned to vassals. Europe and England were still
predominantly agricultural societies, but the
outlines of seafaring commerce, the growth of
small cities, the creation of larger standing
armies, and dynastic turf wars were slowly mak-ing themselves felt. Such developments, along
with the buildup of an increasingly homo-
geneousor similar throughoutculture,
transformed the rough culture of Beowulf
and Malden into the more familiar world of
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England.
Sir Thomas Malorys (14051471) Le Morte
dArthur is a tale of medieval romance and chi-
valry that includes the knights of the Round
Table, the search for the Holy Grail, King
Arthurs wars against the Romans, and the
loves and wars of all the participants. However,Le Morte dArthur pursues all these themes from
the perspective of a later age, when the modern
world was rapidly replacing the medieval
world. The work is full of knightly combat and
war, but also of romanticized events, lords and
ladies, and great triumphs. Like Beowulf, King
Arthur is an archetype, or model against which
similar things are measured. He is a warrior hero
whose feats illustrate the connection between
leadership and battle prowess, a theme that was
to persist in British literature for many centuries
to follow.
Sir Arthur turned with his knights, and smote
behind and before, and ever Sir Arthur was in
the foremost press till his horse was slain
underneath him. . . .Then he drew his sword
Excalibur, but it was so bright in his enemies
eyes, that it gave light like thirty torches. And
therewith he put them a-back, and slew much
people.
One hundred and fifty years later, the
focus of British war literature shifted from
the mythical and legendary to the historical.
Samuel Daniel (15621619) wrote in the
Elizabethan England of Shakespeares day.
Daniel studied and worked as a diplomat in
Europe; when his work of praise to James I,
the new king, was published in 1603, he found
himself drawn into court circles. He was thus
a beneficiary of the noble patronage that was
the chief source of revenue for aspiring wri-
ters. Among Daniels works is a long, rhymed
poem about the English Civil Wars that
sprang up between two houses, The Civil
Wars Between the Two Houses of Lancaster
and York. These wars decisively shaped the
British monarchy and helped form the culture
of Elizabethan England. In 1485, as a final
result of this long-lasting Civil War, Henry
VII was chosen as the first Tudor King of
England. In the poem, Daniel depicts the
glory of battle for those destined to win:And with a cheerful voice encouraging / His
well experiencd and adventurous band, /
Brings on his army, eager unto fight; / And
placd the same before the king in sight. It
would not be unusual for an army to be
eager unto fight if they believed they were
fighting under a divinely chosen leader, and
monarchs were commonly believed to have
been appointed by God.
Prior to the War of the Roses, the English
government was embroiled in the so-called
Hundred Years War with the French govern-ment from 13371451. Many of William
Shakespeares (15641616) historical plays
focus on the dynastic struggles of the Hundred
Years War.
Henry V was first produced in 1599 at the
Globe Theater in London. It completes the
retelling of the Rebellion of the House of
Lancaster, which was at the center of the War
of the Roses. The War of the Roses had been
resolved by the House of Tudors accession to
the throne in the late fifteenth century. (In 1485,
Henry VII became king, to be followed byHenry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, who ruled
until 1603). That is, the War of the Roses, and
the struggles of King Henry V, King Henry
VI and King Richard III, occurred almost
a half century before Shakespeares time.
Shakespeares main source of material for his
historical plays was Raphael Holinshed, who
was using fragmentary sources himself. The
result was that Shakespeare was able to draw
on history, but he also reshaped it. In Henry V,
one of the greatest war plays, Shakespeare
depicts Henry as an idealized king, makinghim masculine, generous, and visionary.
In Act Four of the play, the English army is
exhausted and licking its wounds, about to
encounter the robust French army. King
Henrys job is to inspire his troops and to show
his solidarity with them before the Battle of
Agincourt in 1415. Like Daniel, Shakespeare
describes the privilege and pride of fighting for
a noble cause; in Henrys speech, participation in
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and peace. He had ample experience with war; he
was in England during the bloody period when
Cromwell overthrew the monarchy and in
America during various Native American con-
flicts and King Philips war. These experiences,
combined with those of the religiously intolerant
Pilgrim community of Massachusetts Bay thatbanished him, led Williams into his open and
pacifist position.
Andrew Marvell (16211678) was the
Assistant Latin Secretary to the Council of
State, a position in which he was exposed to the
operations of government at the highest level. In
that position, he served as tutor to the son of
one of Cromwells generals. Due to that connec-
tion and, possibly, to genuine belief, Marvell
greatly admired Cromwell. However, because
of Marvells dependency on the leader for his
job, it is hard to know what his true feelingswere. In An Horatian Ode upon Cromwells
Return from Ireland (1650), Marvell praises
Cromwells military vigor in a time when war
and combat were depicted as glamorous and
masculine, leaders were respected for their mili-
tary prowess over their policies and laws, and
peace was a time of boredom: So restless
Cromwell could not cease / In the inglorious
arts of peace, / But through adventurous war /
Urge` d his active star.
Thomas Hobbess (15881679) Leviathan
(1651) reminds readers that even philosophyhas its political consequences. The origins of
his book lie in what Hobbes felt he had discov-
ered. Like the seventeenth-century French
philosopher Descartes, Hobbes was certain that
science and mathematics, especially geometry,
were the proper tools for advancing human
knowledge. Hobbes, a strong supporter of
Charles I, the king who followed James I; as
Hobbes worked to refine his theories, he became
a victim of Oliver Cromwells intolerance. Exiled
to Holland, Hobbes went on to develop a mate-
rialistic and deterministic theory of human nat-
ure. He denied free will and the finer humanemotions such as altruism; he saw self-interest
as the overriding motive guiding human beings.
He espoused a Roman proverb attributed
to Plautus (c. 254 B.C.184 B.C.) homo homini
lupus est (man is a wolf to man). Given this
view of human nature, it followed that an abso-
lute monarch was the only appropriate ruler;
only this kind of absolute power could guaran-
tee the civility essential to society. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, Hobbes had much to say about
war, which he thought was a natural human
instinct. Peace, on the other hand, could only
be achieved and maintained under the power of
an absolute monarch.
Samuel Butler, in Hudibras (1663), wrote
a savage satire on a fictional leading militaryfigure in Cromwells army. Living in a time
when allegiances to leaders were often tempor-
ary or even deadly, Butler was eager to mock
the Puritan rulers under Cromwells reign.
However, given the nations war mentality in a
time of uneasy peace, he could not write a poem
critical of the reigning powers without risking his
life. Hudibras was not published until the
crown was restored and Charles II was king.
This long poem reflects its authors Royalist
and Anglican leaningslike those of Hobbes
and his contempt for the Cromwellians withtheir Presbyterian conviction of predestiny and
fate. The poem is a bitter assault on Cromwells
military leadership: [S]tyld of war, as well as
peace. / (So some rats, of amphibious nature, /
Are either for the land or water.)
Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset (1638
1706), shared Butlers satirical spirit. After tra-
veling in Europe for a time, he returned to
England shortly before the Restoration of the
monarchy with King Charles II. The Anglo-
Dutch conflict mentioned in Sackvilles Song
(Written at Sea in the First Dutch War, the
night before an Engagement) was a serious
one for the British, involving trading priorities
on the Gold Coast and in the Caribbean. While
Sackville did participate in the conflict, he was
more concerned that the women back home
know that their sailors at sea were trying to
write to them. Then if we write not by each
post, / Think not we are unkind; / Nor yet con-
clude our ships are lost / By Dutchmen or by
wind. This concern and its show of relative
vulnerability is a departure from the traditional
British war literature of noble warriors focused
only on the battle at hand.
One of the greatest of the British poets, John
Milton (16081674) composed two epic poems
that must be considered together, for they deal
with both war and peace. The first of these
poems is Paradise Lost (1667), and the second
is Paradise Regained (1671). In the late 1630s,
Milton traveled throughout Europe, where he
met Galileo and a number of other intellectuals
and writers. His interactions with these people
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deepened his understanding of the world and its
seething conflicts, which he was coming to
understand. He studied the great models of
ancient Greek and Latin poetry, Homers Iliad
and Virgils Aeneid, and in these models, Milton
found visionary narratives devoted to the issues
of war and peace.Paradise Lost, as the title suggests, is about
mans loss of paradise as a result of succumbing
to Satans temptation in the Garden of Eden: the
age-old battle between good and evil, indulgence
and restraint. At the beginning of Book II,
Satan, a fallen angel, is deciding whether to
wage war against Heaven. He is hopeful that
this war will ultimately restore peace: I give
not Heaven for lost: from this descent /
Celestial virtues rising will appear / More glor-
ious and more dread than from no fall. As a
fallen angel, he has rebelled against his creator,and taken with him into rebellion many power-
ful demon leaders. Though his struggle to over-
come God and Heaven is doomed, a vain war
with Heaven, Satan attempts to corrupt Adam
and Eve, the human creations of God. By doing
so, he can still claim victory by destroying his
enemys creations, even though his attack on
Heaven will fail,.
Paradise Regained (1671) concerns Christs
forty-day fast in the wilderness, and is more an
interior narrative than is the action-packed
Paradise Lost. Unlike Adam and Eve in the
Garden of Eden, Christ is able to resist the temp-
tations that Satan offers during his time in the
desert. As opposed to the war-like tone of
Paradise Lost, this poem contains long passages
praising peace in glowing terms and questioning
the advantages of war: They err who count it
glorious to subdue / By conquest far and wide,
to overrun / Large countries, and in field great
battles to win. The poem states that war does
nothing but devastate, and is critical of those
conquerors, who leave behind / Nothing but ruin
wheresoeer they rove, / And all the flourishing
works of peace destroy.
In Annus Mirabilis (Year of Miracles)
(1667), John Dryden (16311700) writes both
about the Dutch War and the rebirth of the city
of London after the disastrous fire of 1666.
Dryden thanks God for the miracle of British
survival and for Londons triumph over terrible
adversity. He echoes earlier writers such as
Daniel and Marvell in his praise of war and
military might, but Drydens praise inspired a
patriotism previously unseen in British war lit-
erature. After a difficult year in which most of
London was affected by the Great Fire, its citi-
zens needed encouraging words as well as a
robust and able national identity. Dryden
reminds readers that Britains naval might is
such that Our trouble now is but to makethem dare, / And not so great to vanquish as to
find. Though domestic troubles may plague the
English people, their soldiers and sailors are so
feared that their enemies hardly dare to engage
them in battle.
A military victory seemed to promise future
wealth to the British nation. In Annus
Mirabilis, Dryden goes on to boast of
Britains trading power, writing That those
who now distain our trade to share, / Shall rob
like pirates on our wealthy coast. This theme of
war as the gateway to commercial developmentwas relatively new in British war literature. The
connection between commerce and imperialism
will reappear as an important theme in works
about Captain Cook and Vancouver at the end
of the eighteenth century.
Thus far, war has been analyzed in terms of
monstrous struggle (Beowulf), military prowess
(Le Morte dArthur), exhortation and nobility of
soul (Henry V), military triumph (Marvells An
Horatian Ode), and the fundamental battles
of the human condition (Paradise Lost). In
Dryden, there is the frank and rousing battle
cry of commercial competition and market
success.
The Earl of Clarendon (16091674) wrote
yet another kind of war literature, a historical
memoir. As an elected member of the House of
Commons in 1640, Clarendon was initially a
strong critic of King Charles I, but eventually
changed his politics and began to support the
Royalists. When Cromwell overthrew the
Royalist forces in 1646, Clarendon went into
exile on the island of Jersey with the king and
the Royalist contingent. After the Restoration,
Clarendon returned to England and served
Charles II as Lord Chancellor. However, in the
course of providing these services, Clarendon
made the mistake of criticizing the kings extra-
vagance, and he was exiled again. While exiled,
he wrote The History of the Rebellion (published
170204). This book, based on conversations
with participants in the Civil War, addresses the
British Civil War in which Charles I was taken
prisoner by Parliament and finally beheaded;
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it also discusses the so-called Roundheads, who
inherited the government of Britain along with
Cromwell.
Period of Revolutions and After:
17701914The century of the British Civil War endedwith revolutions across Europe and North
America; of direct interest to England were
the French Revolution (178999) and the
American Revolution (177476). While the
American Revolution affected British colo-
nies, the British were also concerned about
the French Revolution. The government feared
the precedent set by the taking of the Bastille in
1789 and by the bloody persecutions that fol-
lowed. The resulting massacres, widespread
chaos, and dread in France led British conserva-
tives like Edmund Burke to cry out for restraintand gradualism rather than for immediate and
violent revolution. Burke articulated this view in
his Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790). Though conservatives criticized the revo-
lution in France, in its earlier stages it was a
source of inspiration for some British writers
because of its focus on freedom and equality.
However, the Reign of Terror that followed the
revolution and the oppression under Napoleon
caused a gradual change in literary opinion.
The poet William Blake (17571827) appre-
ciated the apocalyptic power of a revolution,which overturned old values and promised new
spiritual freedom to humankind. Blake was both
an artist and author; he also claimed to have
experienced numerous visions of the angel
Gabriel, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. As his
poetic career unfolded, his artistic temperament
made him susceptible to the French Revolutions
energy and political momentum, as well as the
larger promise for humankind that it repre-
sented. In this passage from The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, Blake writes about the Spirit
of Revolutionoften depicted as a womanthat is essential for the birth of a new world.
The term Albion in the poem refers to
England:
1. The Eternal Female groand! it was heard
over all the Earth:
2. Albions coast is sick, silent; the American
meadows faint!
3. Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the
lakes and the rivers andmutter across the
ocean! France rend down thy dungeon!
Not everyone rejoiced at the prospect of war
and revolution that seemed to threaten England
in the wake of the French and American
Revolutions. Romantic poets Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Lord
Byron were greatly worried about a conflict
and war on British soil.Coleridge (17721834), known for his criti-
cism, his poetry, and his associations with the
great figures of English Romantic poetry, was
not enthusiastic about the French Revolution.
In the poem Fears in Solitude (1798), he writes
that it is easy to be a proponent of war when one
is far from the actual battlefields and not feeling
the repercussions: Secure from actual warfare,
we have loved / To swell the war-whoop, passio-
nate for war! / Alas! for ages ignorant of all / Its
ghastlier workings. Coleridge condems the lust
for war in a people who have not yet known thesuffering it will bring.
Wordsworth (17701850) went to France in
1792 and came to admire the French Revolution,
which he saw as a force for freeing mankind from
the shackles of received opinion and class hierar-
chies. In his long autobiographical poem, The
Prelude, which is divided into fourteen books, he
devotes the earlier books to the progress and
glory of freedom. By the time he reaches Book
Ten, which concerns both the French Revolution
and nature, he has significantly modified his ear-
lier views. The revolution in France seemed to
him to be pure danger and folly; he suggests that
its proponents need of lessons from sober, persis-
tent, and steady Nature, the foundation of all
human wisdom. Wordsworth thus joins Burke
in criticizing violent social change, though he
does so from a very different viewpoint. In
response to the Reign of Terror that followed
the revolution, Wordsworth writes Domestic
carnage now filled the whole year . . . all perish,
all, / Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks, /
Head after head, and never heads enough / For
those that bade them fall.
George Gordon, Lord Byron (17881824),
was the most flamboyant of the English
Romantic poets and the one who exposed him-
self most extensively to the turbulent new world
of contemporary Europe. In 1816, pursued by
rumors of an incestuous relationship with his
sister and an accumulation of bad debts, Byron
left England for Europe; he was never to return
to his native land. He had published the first part
of his long poem, Childe Harolds Pilgrimage,
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in 1812; through the protagonist of that poem he
expresses and refines his own opinions and atti-
tudes toward current affairs in Europe.
Canto 3 of Childe Harolds Pilgrimage
reveals Byrons attitude toward the Battle of
Waterloo (1815), at which the British decisively
beat the French, and after which Napoleon was
driven into exile. In the poem, Byron refers to
France as Gaul and wonders about the true
outcome of the battle: Fit retribution! Gaul
may champ the bit / And foam in fetters;but
is Earth more free? By the time he completed
Childe Harolds Pilgrimage, Byron was a bit-
ter opponent of war, which wiped away all
achievement; still, throughout his own wander-
ings in Europe he delighted in striking military
poses and participating in conflicts, such as the
one devoted to liberating Greece from the
Ottoman Turks. His relationship to war wascomplex; like many men, Byron was both
repelled by and attracted to conflict.
As Britain developed into a colonial power
around the world, British citizens occupied many
areas across the globe. George Vancouver (1757
1798) joined the Royal Navy at the age of four-
teen. At age fifteen, he sailed with Captain James
Cook during the Captains second and ill-fated
third voyages. Vancouvers Voyage of Discovery
(1798) recounts how the party of sailors reached
the Hawaiian Islands. Due to some local tribal
frictions and a lack of diplomacy on Cooks part,Vancouver was beaten and held captive by the
islanders. This occurred only a day before Cook
was speared to death after a confrontation with
the islanders. Like the explorers of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, Vancouverand Cook met
with resistance and violence in their encounters
with native populations. After his experience on
the Hawaiian Islands, Vancouver went on to
further navigation and discovery, leaving his
name as well as his influence on the Northwest
Coast of the Americas. However, Vancouvers
work serves as a reminder that the tensionbetween explorer-settlers and native populations
was not unique to North America and often
resulted in bloody and violent battles.
Thomas Love Peacocks The War Song of
Dinas Vawr (1829) was written at a time when
the British Empire was beginning to consolidate
its international holdings. Peacock (17851866)
entered the service of Britains India Company
in 1819, becoming Chief Examiner of Indian
Correspondence in 1836, and retiring from the
company in 1856. His life experience was thus
professionally bound to the administration of
the British colony of India. The War Song of
Dinas Vawr is a satirical take on the popular
history ballads of the time, rhymes that glorified
war and battle. In historic epic poems such as theIliad and the Aeneid, wars are waged and sacri-
fices made for grand ideas, under the leadership
of men who inspire. In contrast, the men in
Peacocks poem have stolen a herd of sheep
and proceed to slaughter anyone who opposes
their theft, an absurd excuse for combat that
nonetheless results in a frenzy of violence: We
there, in strife bewildering, / Spilt blood enough
to swim in: / We orphand many children / And
widowd many women.
The poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson
(18091892) coincides with the Victorian age inliterature, a period characterized by concern for
issues such as the Darwins evolutionary discov-
eries, the extension of British Imperialism, the
slave trade, and the social ills generated by the
growing industrialization of the British eco-
nomy. Tennysons poem The Charge of the
Light Brigade (1854) records a suicidal attack
by British light cavalry over open country.
Though there was no hope of victory in the
attack, the soldiers charged at their leaders mis-
taken command, running to their certain death:
Not tho the soldier knew / Someone had blun-
derd. The charge occurred in the Battle ofBalaclava, in the Ukraine, during the Crimean
War (185456). Britain had entered that war to
protect British sea routes in the Dardanelles off
Turkey, joining forces with France and Turkey
against Russia. The battle depicted in The
Charge of the Light Brigade cost the lives of
close to two hundred of the more than six hun-
dred men who fought in the battle. The authors
attitude toward the war and the men of the Light
Brigade is ambiguous: it is difficult to tell
whether he believes the menand the war
itselfto be glorious and heroic or foolish andfatal. Even if Tennyson disapproves of the war,
he blames the leaders rather than the soldiers. Of
the soldiers he writes, Theirs not to make reply,
/ Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do
and die: / Into the valley of Death
Matthew Arnold (18221888) was one of the
great literary and cultural critics of the Victorian
era, and though he was not specifically a poet of
war (or peace), he took part in many of the
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influential events of his time. As a distinguished
Oxford professor, a well-traveled school inspec-
tor, and a frequent visitor to America and the
European continent, Arnold served as a kind of
social conscience of his time. His poem Dover
Beach (1867) reflects this role.
In this poem, Arnold surveys a calm sea,seeing both peace and sadness. He reflects on
the tide of religious faith, which was once full,
but has now receded, leaving mortals sure of
nothing except their love for one another. At
the end of the poem he turns to the world,
which, though it seems / to lie before us like a
world of dreams,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and
flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
As faith recedes and uncertainty takes its
place, human conflict is unchecked. In this
poem, Arnold gives a general and sweeping
indictment of war.
Thomas Hardy (18401928) is best known
as a novelist, the author of books like Far from
the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native,
Tess of the dUrbervilles, and Jude the Obscure.
He was also a poet, and expressed his view of war
as it developed during the Second Boer War
(18991902) and the World War I (19141918).
The Boer War aimed to assure the unimpeded
development of British trade in South Africa and
to guarantee access to South African gold mines.
Hardys poem Drummer Hodge (1902) illus-
trates the bleak fate the Boer War delivered to
British soldiers, many of whom died in a foreign
country without family or friends to bury them:
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest /
Uncoffinedjust as found. Though he died
on lonely foreign soil, Hodge has become a
part of the country he was fighting in: Yet por-
tion of that unknown plain / Will Hodge for ever
be. There is cold comfort in the soldiers death,which Hardy seems to imply will go unnoticed
and unremembered.
Not every Englishman saw the Boer War as
Hardy did. Arthur Conan Doyle (18591930) is
best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories, but
this Scottish eye doctor and spokesman for
British Imperialism also devoted himself to
historical and journalistic efforts. Doyle served
several months as a senior physician in a field
hospital during the Boer War and wrote The
Great Boer War (1901), in which he defended
Englands policy of imperialism and coloniza-
tion. In this work, Doyle trivializes the successes
of the Afrikanersthe enemyin the First Boer
War, which Britain lost. Doyle refers to those
battles as little more than skirmishes and claimthat if Britain had won that war, these Afrikaner
victories would have been forgotten.
World War I and After: 19151939The Crimean War and the Boer War were con-
sequences of British Imperialist ambition. World
War I, which occurred a bit more than a decade
after the Second Boer War, was a different mat-
ter. It was provoked by something that might
have seemed like an isolated incidenta Serbian
nationalist murdering the Austrian Archduke.
However, the war gained a volatile momentumof its own. Serbia drew its ally, Russia, into the
war. Austria invited Germany into an alliance
and Germany quickly accepted, invading
Belgium. The British entered in opposition to
Germany, as England was tied to Belgium in a
defensive alliance. France was bound to Russia
in a mutual defense treaty, and to England in a
looser pact. This sequence of rapidly moving
events collided in 1914, leaving Germany and
the Austro-Hungarian Empire fighting a world
war against the Western Allies and Russia.
The first global conflict in history was theresult. Military strategy and the science to
support it had evolved, making this war, with
its trench warfare, poison gas, and shell shock,
the nastiest on record. Some of the most inno-
vative and introspective literature about war
ever written came out of World War I; the
modernist movement in literature and art was
a response to the devastation of World War I.
The violence and inhumanity of the war pene-
trated throughout it and throughout the coun-
tries involved. Artists and writers felt that
meaningful communication of this horror
required entirely new forms of art and litera-ture. This war generated an outburst of distin-
guished lyric poems, once again reminding
readers of the relationship between war and
creative energies.
Irishman William Butler Yeats (18651939)
was a student of Irish folklore as well as the
supernatural and the occult. He wrote poems
and plays in Dublin, several of which addressed
the Irish struggle for independence from Britain.
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He was elected to the Irish senate in 1922 and
was politically active throughout most of his life.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
In his poem An Irish Airman Foresees His
Death (1918), Yeats articulates the horrible
truth of an airmans reality, the realization that
his death will do nothing for his country and is
essentially a waste. This sentiment echoes the
feeling of alienation and resignation in Hardys
Drummer Hodge. Still, the airman continues
on his mission: Those that I fight I do not hate, /Those that I guard I do not love . . . No likely
end could bring them loss / Or leave them hap-
pier than before. For a brief moment he is
ecstatic in pure identification with his mission,
one with the air, one with the sky. In this sense,
the airman meets a far more ennobling death
than does Drummer Hodge.
In his poem Easter 1916 (1916), Yeats
brings his powerful poetic innovation to bear
on a topic close to his heart: the struggle for
Irish independence. The poem was occasioned
by a small but bloody rebellion in which a gath-
ering of Irish patriots, using weapons supplied
by Germany, plotted to drive out the British
occupiers. In the end, everything went wrong
for the Irish rebellion: their weapon supplies
were intercepted, some of their top leaders were
arrested, and their military strategy proved
immature. In short order the rebels surrendered,
downtown Dublin suffered major damage, andthe rebellion was brought to a halt. This would
apparently have been the end of it, had the
British handled their success carefully.
The British, however, fed the violence of
resistance and the power of Yeatss poem.
Many of the rebellion leaders were executed,
shocking the Irish public. Yeats addresses
the terrible beauty of this turn of events
in Easter 1916, one of literatures most
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compelling commentaries on power and suffer-
ing in war. After celebrating several of the
beloved Irish individuals who fell victim to the
rebellion, Yeats sums up the mission of his rebel-
lion poem, and extends his praise to those
who fell:
I write it out in a verseMacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
The terrible beauty is the beauty of sacrifice
for the ideal of independence. As in his poem on
the Irish airman, Yeats finds a kind of beauty in
war, a beauty that may depend on its futility.
This profound perspective does not appear in
any of the other texts assembled here.
Poet Rupert Brooke (18871915) joined theBritish forces in World War I, but only served
one day of limited action, during the British
retreat from Antwerp in Belgium. He died in
1915 on his way to fight in the Battle of
Gallipoli, not from war wounds but from blood
poisoning. He was buried on the Greek Island of
Skyros. In contrast to Hardys Drummer Hodge,
whose burial on foreign soil was depicted as
bitter and alienating, the soldier in Brookes
The Soldier (1915) considers falling in a for-
eign country to be a point of pride; it is an honor
to make such a sacrifice for his country: If Ishould die, think this only of me: / That theres
some corner of a foreign field / That is forever
England.
Wilfred Owen (18931918) was killed in
action in France just seven days before the
Armistice that ended World War I. His view of
the war differed greatly from Brookes and more
closely echoes the worries and isolation of
Yeatss Irish airman and Hardys Drummer
Hodge. Owens poem Anthem for Doomed
Youth (1920) speaks to the ultimate fear in the
heart of a soldier: dying anonymously on a bat-
tlefield where men die as cattle. There will be
no funeral, no bell to mark his passing, Only the
monstrous anger of the guns. / Only the stutter-
ing rifles rapid rattle. None of the optimism of
Brookes poem is found here; disillusionment
was becoming an increasingly common theme
in British war literature at this time. Owens
words are a far cry from the praise of war and
the search for valor found in Shakespeares
Henry V.
In her short novel The Return of the Soldier
(1918), Rebecca West (18921983) writes an
intimate war story that flowers into a broad
commentary on World War I, featuring an inter-
esting blend of feminism and conservatism.
In the novel, two women await Captain
Chris Baldrys return from war: his wife, Kitty,and his cousin, Jenny. Jenny, living in the lovely
Thames country house Chris built, yearns to see
her cousin return: [L]ike most Englishwomen of
my time, I was wishing for the return of a soldier.
Disregarding the national interest and every-
thing else . . . I wanted to snatch my Cousin
Christopher from the wars.
Chris returns from the war with amnesia.
Though the year is 1916, he believes he is in the
year 1901, knows nothing of his wife, and recom-
mences wooing Margaret, a pub keepers daugh-
ter whom he had been courting fifteen years
earlier. Though Chriss ailment concerns the
women, they worry that if he recovers, he will
be sent right back to the battlefields. They are
left to agonize over which state is better: illness
and peace, or health and war. He eventually
recovers and is called back to join his unit in
the war, facing a brutal reality which will no
doubt bereave all three of these women. West
feels the world is rotting, and writes with deep
sympathy for the anxiety and sadness of women
waiting for soldiers to return.
David Jones (18951974) enlisted in the war
in 1914, and served extensively in Flanders and
France. From this experience, he drew his extra-
ordinary poetic novel, In Parenthesis (1937).
However, he does not limit his narrative to his
personal experience. Jones draws from Welsh
and Anglo-Saxon myths and legends to create
this epic tale, which follows Private John Balls
company through preparations for battle, the
battle itself, and on to the end of the battle,
which results in the death of Balls entire com-
pany. The use of mythological and religious
sources serves to connect the characters in thiswar poem with the tradition of British epics such
as Beowulf, Le Morte dArthur, and Henry V.
Jones refers to the battlefield as a place of
enchantment, connecting it to Malorys Le
Morte dArthur. He writes that he called his
novel In Parenthesis because he had written it
in a kind of space between . . . the war itself was
a parenthesishow glad we thought we were to
step outside its brackets at the end of 18.
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Frank OConnor (190366), author of
Guests of the Nation (1931), brings readers to
the Irish civil war, the long intractable conflict
between Catholic and Protestant factions on the
island.
In1918two yearsafter YeatssEaster1916
poemOConnor joined the Irish RepublicanArmy (IRA) and took part in actions designed
to do away with British rule. He continued as
an activist, but year by year, his commitment to
writing took precedence. OConnor was at his best
in the short story form, and nowhere does he deal
better with the problem of wartime conflict than
in his story Guests of the Nation.
In the story, the Irish Republican Army has
taken two British military hostages. A friendship
develops between the two hostages and their cap-
tors. Off in the countryside, in a secret location
where the IRA keeps its prisoners, the two pairsplay cards at night, talk politics, and exchange
family news. Then an order comes from the IRA
commandant to execute the two Englishmen. The
storys real import resonates from this point, as
the author takes the reader inside the emotions of
the four major charactersparticularly the two
anguished Irishmen. This fascinating and under-
stated tale leaves a strong impression that the
ideology of war is ultimately deeply inhuman,
whatever its initial purposes.
George Orwell (19031950) lived in the
British territory of Burma from 1922 to 1927,where he worked in Police Administration. In
that position, he experienced firsthand the effects
of British Imperialism. Disgusted with imperialist
policy, Orwell went to Spain in the 1930s to fight
with the United Workers Marxist Party in their
struggle against the dictatorship of Francisco
Franco. Franco was a ruthless Spanish ruler
who espoused the same fascist ideology that was
sweeping Germany and Italy at the time. Orwell
was wounded in the neck while fighting. During
his recuperation, he discovered that he did
not believe in Marxism, a political belief that
the workers of a country should reclaim thewealth that they have created for the ruling
class. Instead, Orwell embraced the milder
forms of British socialism, a political ideology
aimed at creating a classless society, but deter-
mined to overthrow the status quo. Orwells
book Homage Catalonia (1952) grew from these
experiences.
The book describes the northern Spanish
city of Barcelona saturated with the ugly
atmosphere of war, yet full of hope for a coming
revolution. From this revolution, people expect
a new sense of freedom and equality among
human beings. This book, unlike any other sur-
veyed in this essay, is written as the creation of
an intellectual, one testing out ideas, acting
through an ideology. The reader follows thecourse of a mans search for answers about
how to organize society, deliberations carried
out in the heat of a battle that engaged many
Western intellectuals during the period of
Francos regime in Spain. Orwell also shows
that war never serves the ideals of any system
of thought, instead imposing its own vicious
rhythms on what might have initially seemed to
be a struggle for a just cause. War does not exist
to make a point, but to vent frustrations as well
as hostility and to satisfy the craving for new
territory.
Orwells disenchantment with Marxism
underwrites another influential work, one
which is also concerned with the conflicts of his
time. In Animal Farm (1945), Orwell creates a
parable. His story illustrates a moral about ani-
mals who, like the Russian Communists of the
time, take power into their own hands and refuse
to passively submit to the dictates of their human
masters. Major, the prize boar, addresses the
barnyard and incites a revolution during which
the animals take over their farm; no sooner do
they do so than they begin to bicker over power
and find themselves being manipulated by ani-mal rulers that are not very different from their
human masters. Major reminds his comrades
that the single solution to all their problems is
to remove man, the source of overwork and
insufficient food. The animal revolution, how-
ever, ultimately proves a disappointment; it sim-
ply installs a new tyranny, which Orwell suggests
is the inevitable result of revolutionary social
revision.
Orwell strikes a new note in his writing
about the facts of war and social change. While
not without hope, he challenges any convictionthat violent change is the best way to lend force
to valuable and idealistic beliefs.
Fred Thomas, like Orwell and many other
English intellectuals in the thirties, served
in the British anti-tank battery of the 15th
International Brigade in Spain. He was there
to join the battle against Franco. Thomas, too,
went off to war for ideological reasons and soon
found the conflict to be more complex than
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he had anticipated. Thomas was wounded in
action twice, fighting in heavy battles at
Brunete, Teruel, and on the Ebro River, and he
spent long periods recuperating in the hospital.
Furthermore, Thomas, like Orwell, found that,
in practice, the ideology of the anti-Franco
forces was not what he wanted it to be. His
diary of this struggle, To Tilt at Windmills
(1996), offers intimate glimpses of the Spanish
war in the late 1903s. The title of the memoir
recalls Miguel de Cervantess Don Quixote(1605) and its main characters quest for the
romance of war and chivalry in a world where
it no longer existed.
Thomas is less abstract than Orwell and
presents a compelling picture of daily suffering
in the war. He also captures the ultimate frustra-
tion of fighting a war on foreign soil, where one
remains a stranger to the end even though one is
committed to the cause.
World War II: 1940 into the LateTwentieth CenturyThe Spanish Civil War, the growth of the Nazi
ideology in Germany, and the consolidation of
Communist power in the (former) Soviet Union
all cast a shadow over the Western world, a sha-
dow that suggested imminent disaster to many.
The catastrophe came in the form of a Second
World War characterized by a systematic human
brutality that dwarfed that of the First World
War. From the extermination of six million Jewsin the concentration camps to the atomic bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, World
War II took the horror and destruction of war
to a new level.
In the four novels of The Raj Quartet
(196675), Paul Mark Scott (19201978) takes
readers out of the world of Western wars and into
the military and colonial atmosphere of post-
Independence India. Scott places his extensive
Damaged buildings in Cannon Street in London during the Blitz of World War II, May 29, 1941 Getty Images
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fictions in this setting; he also uses it to frame his
broad understanding of cultural differences and
the intricacies of colonialism, so much of which
derives from the simple exercise of military
power.
In The Raj Quartet, Scott carefully analyze
the social tensions in military and administrativecircles in India during the last five years of the
British colonial occupation (194247). This per-
iod of occupation was commonly called the Raj.
The theme of these long novels is the way British
power in India was stifled by obstacles such as the
powerful resistance headed by Mahatma Gandhi.
Scott examines life in military circles and
studies the last stages of an Empire motivated
by economic concerns and a quest for military
dominance. Scotts theme in that context is the
failure of the British Empires civilizing mis-
sion in India. In Scotts novels, that missionaimed to bring peace and economic development
to an undeveloped country. That intention went
astray because its execution was fundamentally
paternalistic, like that of a parent overseeing a
child. Because of this overbearing attitude on the
part of the British, the Indians were not properly
prepared for life after the Empire.
Peace was elusive in Britain, as well. Dame
Edith Sitwell (18871964) played a prominent
role in the London art scene. One of her most
successful poems, Still Falls the Rain (1942),
draws on her experiences during the Germanblitz over London. Her perspective was that of
a woman living in a war zone and suffering the
devastating effects of constant attack; she thus
presents a new facet of British war literature.
Works such as Sitwells remind the reader that
the casualties of war do not occur only on the
battlefield. She likens the dark rain that fell dur-
ing Christs crucifixion to that which is falling
over the world during war; both events, she con-
tends, involve the murder and sacrifice of inno-
cents. War, then, is essentially sacrilegious, an
action against God: Then sounds the voice of
One who like the heart of man / Was once a childwho among beasts has lain / Still do I love,
still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee.
Like Sitwell, Elizabeth Bowen (18991973)
wrote about the German bombing of London in
her novel The Heat of the Day (1945). Her text
explodes with descriptions of terrifying daylight
bombing raids as experienced by average peo-
ple. Passages of chilling violencewalls falling,
bottles tipped upside down, street pavements
crackinginsert themselves into scenes from
ordinary British lives: housewives preparing
dinner, husbands hurrying back on the tube
from a day of work, and lovers furtively joining.
The last is of particular relevance to the story,
which concentrates on the way strong personal
emotions co-exist with a virtually disintegratingpublic life.
By showing lovers subjected to searing
wartime attacks, Bowen makes it clear that life
goes on, even in wartime. Life in wartime is none-
theless totally transformed by challenges and dis-
coveries absent from the calmer climate of peace.
The horrors of war are vividly presented here, yet
Bowen also illustrates the strange fascinations of
a world turned upside down by conflict.
W. H. Auden (19071973) was another
writer who went to Spain in support of the
opposition to Franco; unlike Orwell, he wasnot appreciated, for he was not a member of
the Communist Party. As a result, by the late
1930s Audens tone was less politically radical
than it had been in the previous decade,
although he remained an intense foe of totali-
tarianism, a regime in which the state controls
almost all aspects of public and private life.
During World War II, Auden worked with the
American Army, surveying German civilians
psychological reactions to bombing. From this
direct experience of the damage wrought by
war, Auden brought forth texts like The
Shield of Achilles (1955), a modernization of
Homers famous shield description at the end of
the Iliad. Like Milton and many other of the
greatest British writers, Auden drew inspiration
from one of the greatest epic war poems in world
literature.
In Greek mythology, Achilles loses his
shield after loaning it to a friend who dies in
battle during the Trojan War. This is a particu-
larly significant event in Homers version of
myth and war. Achilles mother goes to the
god of fire, Hephaestus, and asks him to forge
a new shield for her son. On the shield created
by the craftsman god are depictions of bucolic
landscapes and images of war and peace. In
Audens poem, however, all images of peace
on the shield have been lost and replaced with
horrible images of war, including the concen-
tration camps where they were small / and
could not hope for help and no help came: /
What their foes liked to do was done, their
shame / Was all the worst could wish. The
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modern form of brutish, dehumanizing warfare
is thus denied any connection to the noble wars
of antiquity.
The poet Henry Reed (19141986) was in
the British Army from 1941 to 1942. His early
poetry dealt with political events that occurred
before and during World War II. His perspectiveon the war experience in Lessons of the War is
ironic and fresh, contrasting the protocol and
bureaucracy of preparation for war with the
messy and lethal experience of the battlefield.
Lessons of the War (1941) was based on the
words of Reeds drill instructor, and throughout
the poem, young soldiers are given instructions
on weaponry, the science of judging distances,
and strategies for carrying out unarmed hand-
to-hand combat. Despite all their technical train-
ing, the narrator emphasizes a different weapon:
While awaiting a proper issue, we must learnthat lesson / Of the ever-important question of
human balance. / It is courage that counts.
Reeds Lessons of War is reminiscent of
American novelist Stephen Cranes The Red
Badge of Courage (1895), which raises the funda-
mental problem of courage: soldiers ask, Am I
brave enough? Reed refuses military posturing
and reduces the military enterprise to a simple
emotional level, refusing to imply scorn for the
coward or to be taken in by the posturing of the
hero.
James Fentons (1949 ) poem A German
Requiem was written thirty-six years after the
end of World War II, and serves as a reminder
that war does not end when the fighting stops. In
this poem, Fenton is engaged with the issues of
historical guilt, memory, and imagination as
they play out in the minds of victims and survi-
vors of wars such as the one that engulfed Nazi
Germany. World War II haunts its survivors and
fills them with horrible memories that they can-
not forget. Yet the things they can no longer
remember cause the most terrible pain: joy, per-
sonal recollections, and life before the war.
It is not what theybuilt. It is whattheyknocked
down.
It is not the houses. It is the space between the
houses.
It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets
that no longer exist.
It is not your memories which haunt you.
It is not what you have written down.
It is what you have forgotten, what you must
forget.
Many cite World War II as a war waged with
moral certainty. In other words, the evil in the
situationHitler, the Nazis, the concentration
camps, the bombing of Pearl Harborwas easily
and clearly identified. It was easy to define the
roles in us versus them, a division at the heart of
all successful warfare. Most Allied soldiers andcitizens (French, British, and American) believed
that World War II was just and essential to end-
ing unrestrained oppression and genocide. The
wars that followed in the twentieth century, how-
ever, often lacked that feeling of moral certainty.
The Vietnam War is a prime example of this
difficulty. The United States entered a war on
vague terms and fought an enemy that blended
seamlessly with civilians. The U.S. government
concealed information; thousands of soldiers
lost their lives in a cause that became increasingly
unclear; and the war became known as a quag-
mire, a situation from which there was no easyexit. To be defeated in war, as the United States
was, also brought home to the nation the precar-
ious nature of military conflict.
Throughout the world, people protested
Americas military presence in Vietnam. Poet
Adrian Mitchell (1932 ) wrote the poem To
Whom It May Concern (1965) as a protest
against the war, which would last for another
ten years after the poem was written. I smell
something burning, hope its just my brains. /
Theyre only dropping peppermints and daisy-
chains / So stuff my nose with garlic / [. . .
] / Tellme lies about Vietnam.
Mitchells poem explores the distrust that
many felt toward the U.S. governments official
version of events in Vietnam. The something
that Mitchell smells burning is napalm, a gaso-
line-based weapon that developed during World
War II and used extensively on military and
civilian targets during the Vietnam War. The
reference in the next line to peppermints and
daisy-chains satirizes the way the government
justified their actions, claiming that their pre-
sence in Vietnam was almost a positive one,bringing gifts to the Vietnamese people.
Mitchell finds those claims so implausible that
he asks to have his senses taken away so that he
can believe these lies about the Vietnam War.
Laurie Lee (19141997) wrote a trilogy of
autobiographical works: Cider with Rosie (1959),
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969),
and A Moment of War: A Memoir of the Spanish
Civil War (1991). The second volume covers Lees
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departure from home in the 1930s and his wander-
ings through Europe. It ends with Lees being
evacuated from Spain by a British ship, then
returning to Europe and entering Spain through
the Pyrenees mountains to join the Republican
anti-Franco forces, the same forces Orwell and
Thomas joined. The third volume in the trilogy
claims to be an eyewitness account of the war
itself, with a full discussion of Lees difficult
quest to enroll in the International Brigade. The
book appeared in the United States in 1993 and
was praised for its extraordinary power and
honesty.
In 1998, British newspapers reported star-
tling news from Bill Alexander, secretary of the
Association of the International Brigade, the
foreign volunteer fighters in the Spanish Civil
War. Alexander had evidence that Lee had not
participated in the war, and that his memoir was
fictional. This news, apparently, was not a sur-
prise to everyone; as early as 1991, Lees book
had been described as fiction.
Lees fictional autobiography signals aninteresting change in war literature: a rekind-
ling of the desire to be associated with the glory
and romance of war. For hundreds of years,
much war literature had favored reality over
romance, focusing on the devastation and
search for meaning that war ignites. This was
a shift from the glorification and romance of
war depicted in ancient texts such as the Iliad,
Beowulf, and Le Morte dArthur. Perhaps Lee
RHETORIC OFWAR
There is a threshold above which common poli-
tical speech shifts into the moving realm of ora-
tory. Abraham Lincoln achieved this kind of
breakthrough in his Second Inaugural Address,
as did the ancient Greeks and Romans, who
were attuned to the importance of great rhetoric.
Modern readers still study Pericles funeral ora-
tion, a product of Athens in the fifth century
B.C.; we also still read Ciceros Orations against
the Catilinarian Conspiracy, made in Rome dur-
ing the first century B.C.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
(18741965) and American President Franklin
D. Roosevelt (18821945) are part of this
grand tradition. External circumstances drove
these men to harness the rhetorical power of
speech; as a result, they have left their mark on
history.
World War II presented huge challenges to
the civilized world as Nazi Germany and
Imperial Japan threatened the Western demo-
cratic tradition. Though this challenge had
been building for several decades, the Axis
powers threat exploded into every aspect of the
Allies public life in the late 1930s. Military,
social, and economic life were all focused ondefeating Hitler and the Japanese. World War
II commanded global attention from 1939 to
1945, from Pearl Harbor and the German inva-
sion of Poland to the atom bomb over Nagasaki.
By the end of the war, a fatal split emerged
between the former Allies as Russia followed
its own path into a kind of communism and the
Western Allies attempted to reconstruct their
badly defeated former enemies. In this devastat-
ing setting, Roosevelt and Churchill were called
upon to articulate their power, sympathy, and
resolve. Whole peoples needed to be inspired and
encouraged.
Roosevelt described December 7, 1941
when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harboras
a date that will live in infamy. Roosevelt
addressed the nation on December 8, 1941,
in a famous speech rallying Americans and
calling for a declaration of war. The Japanese
had been carrying on various diplomatic
negotiations with the U.S. government while
preparing these attacks. In the face of their
unprovoked and dastardly attack, the
President spoke on behalf of the nation: The
people of the United States have already
formed their opinions and well understand
the implications to the very life and safety ofour nation.
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wanted to link himself with the valor and brav-
ery associated with World War IIera battles
against fascist aggression, just as the ancients
wrote to connect themselves with great battles
and leaders.
ConclusionOver time, the portrayal of war and peace has
changed in British literature. Patterns emerge
during the historical development of these war
stories, and the texts surveyed here display a
variety of attitudes toward war. When one ana-
lyzes how these attitudes have evolved, several
trends become evident.
The concept of warfare in Beowulf, The
Battle of Malden, and Le Morte dArthur seems
premodern to contemporary readers. These texts
describe war as an exercise in prowess and victi-
mization, an opportunity for glory and mascu-
line feats, and an open struggle in a time when
death was a stronger presence in human affairs.
When war is a rough fact of life, little literary
attention is paid to the specifics of peace.
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth cen-
tury, there are occasional notes of lyrical patri-
otism or military enthusiasm. Samuel Daniel
praises Henry VII, the first Tudor King, for his
prowess in battle; Shakespeare, in Henry V, gives
brilliant expression to British patriotism; and
Andrew Marvell, in his Horatian Ode on
Cromwells victory. This kind of patriotism is
not much in style today, but earlier writers
Roosevelts Infamy speech is an impas-
sioned request for Congress to declare war on
Japan, but its brevity belies the gravity of its
impact: Hostilities exist. There is no blinking
at the fact that our people, our territory and our
interests are in grave danger. The speech has a
simple and forceful unity, appropriate to crisis,
but still calm and determined: With confidence
in our armed forceswith the unbounded deter-
mination of our peoplewe will gain the inevi-
table triumph. The nation was inspired by
Roosevelts words and went willingly into battle.
In contrast, Churchills Iron Curtain speech
in 1946 was a long, reflective, and almost scholarly
response to events after World War II. His speech
addresses the gradual origins of the cold war
between the West and the Soviet Union and for-
mulates the dangers of these anxious and baffling
times. This speech that coined the term iron
curtain, which described the division of Eastern
and Western Europe that lasted until 1989.
There are several masterful touches in
Churchills speech, and they all spring from his
rhetorical skill. The image of the iron curtain
summed up the eras dilemma. It described the
situation, but it also provided language that
would endure into the futurefor example the
lifting of the Iron Curtain symbolized by the fall
of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He reminds the
United States that its role as a world power
makes it necessary that the constancy of mind,
persistency of purpose, and the grand simplicity
of decision shall guide the conduct of English-
speaking peoples in peace as they did in war. He
also expresses his hope that the pain and suffer-
ing of World War II will make it possible to
guard the homes of the common people from
the horrors and miseries of another war.
Churchills Iron Curtain speech is per-
haps his best known oration. Its rhetorical
strength derives from the way it marks off a
specific geographical area and lists the captive
cities of the region, each of them dignified and
noble, but still part of the Soviet sphere.
The embedded warning about the increasing
measure of control puts Moscow on notice
that further encroachment will not be toler-
ated, yet Churchill still allows for the possibi-
lity of negotiation. These are small points in a
long and artful speech, but they show the
finesse which Churchill achieved time and
again during the pregnant military-economic
moment that characterized Western democra-
cies in the era of the World War II.
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expressed less ambiguous attitudes toward war
and military victory. Consider a World War I
poem like Rupert Brookes The Soldier. The
patriotism of that poem will sound naive and
insincere to readers brought up with the
Vietnam, Korean, and Iraq wars.
By the nineteenth century and on throughWorld War I, compassion for the ordinary sol-
dier becomes an important literary theme. This
note is more elegiac and less strident than the
full-scale assaults on war which will emerge in
the novels of World War II. Consider
Tennysons Charge of the Light Brigade,
Hardys Drummer Hodge, and Wilfred
Owens Anthem for Doomed Youth. These
texts are sad and compassionate, reflecting the
sentimentality that was a defining element of the
Victorian Era in England.
There is a sharp contrast between these sen-timental views and the attitudes expressed by
World War II and Vietnam-era writers such as
Mitchell, Fenton, or Auden. War as they knew it
is almost devoid of humanity; as a result, the
soldiers fighting it were cut back to the bone of
mere existence.
In the last century, some writers have turned
to reflection on war, sometimes engaging in war
as part of an ideology. Traces of the intellectua-
lization of the military enterprise appeared long
before this time, but its strength as a theme
shines forth in this period. Vancouver, Hardy,
Scott, and Doyle were all involved in Englandscolonial endeavors, and Orwell and Thomas
foughtand wrotefor the cause of the Spanish
Civil War.
War and peace are facets of humanity; as
such, they will always find a place in literature.
The evolution of British attitudes toward war will
continue in the face of future conflicts. Englands
war literatureand increasingly, peace literat-
urewill change as well, recording the countrys
shifting perspective on these subjects.
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