War Literature
Introduction to War Literature
Joe Woodward, in his article ‘The Literature of War’, wrote, “as long as there has been war, there have been writers trying to understand it.” When such a destructive and impactful event is a constant fixture in global society, it surely deserves critical thought, public review, and serious debate, and that is what war poets and novelists have been doing for years — and are still doing presently.
It’s important to note that we’ve seen a transition in scholarship over the years from an almost exclusive focus on white male soldiers extending into studies in trauma, female perspectives, emphasis on the experiences of minorities, and examining the home front in closer detail, too.
The first war novels were typically in the epic poetry and sagas of the classical and medieval era with texts such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Beowulf being set in battle, which were originally written to preserve the histories or mythologies of the culture while simultaneously making it accessible to others. Dramatists’ tragedies and histories were also early influences on the war novel. Shakespeare’s Henry V was particularly groundbreaking in that it provided a new model for telling historical tales in a fictional framework.
Modern war novelists have often based their battlefields on depictions of hell and Armageddon in classical texts, such as Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as the Book of Revelations itself.
The War Novel
The war novel as we know it today really sees its origins in the 1800s, with depictions of the Battle of Waterloo, the American Civil War, and the Russian Napoleonic Wars. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a famous example of this gradual emergence of the famous themes of war literature: realism, graphic description of wartime scenes, and the exploration of moral deliberations and existentialism.
War literature really became famous in WWI, however. Henri Barbusse is often credited for having written one of the earliest and most influential texts ‘Le Feu’ (Under Fire) in 1916, and it helped kickstart the anti-war revolution that took place in the literary sphere, with many following in the French soldier’s footsteps.
The 1920s are often credited for the ‘War Book Boom’ in which many novels were written in the immediate aftermath of WWI, the trauma, heroism, and anarchism still fresh in people’s minds.
Some war novels have focused very specifically on battle itself; gruesome injury and soldiers themselves, such as Sebastian Faulks’ Bird Song and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Others, however, have focused on the results of war, the ripple effects; PTSS, alienation, broken societies and families, such as Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. These trauma-centric war novels often offer a different perspective, for example, a therapist, a mother, a wife. These people haven’t been to war but the novel is still told through their eyes, making them rather extraordinary examples of war literature. Virginia Woolf regarded herself as one of the only people offering a female perspective on war, power, and conflict, and believed herself to be particularly valuable in her contributions to literature for this reason, which many critics have agreed with.
WWI was very euro-centric in the books it produced but WWII gave way to a new rise of American novelists, such as Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, and while some authors encompassed entire wars and conducted deep explorations that span years, others honed in on specific battles or eras within a war, such as James Hanley’s No Direction which tells the story of the Blitz.
Elizabeth Bowen wrote The Heat of the Day which steered clear of the explicit violence of WWII, the events of the novel simply took place during that time, focusing on people and the effects the war had on her story instead, offering a slightly altered framework for war literature, building on the precedent of trauma-centric literature.
The Holocaust spiked a lot of novels in the post-war period and is a popular literature topic even today with books like ‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’ reaching massive levels of popularity. Vietnam, the Cold War, Iran-Iraq, the Gaza Conflict, and the post 9/11 War on Terror are less popular topics but have all inspired fascinating pieces of literature revolving around war. Some people in war zones now write blogs or magazines about their experiences, collecting those of others too in some cases, such as Colby Buzzell’s wildly popular blog My War, in which a soldier documents his experience in Iraq.
War Poetry
Poetry has been incredibly important in both a literary and historical function over the years, and it’s often a tool to see a soldier’s journey throughout the conflict, the reader witnessing the gradual toll war takes on the poet. Of course, the most famous war poets were writing in WWI: Rupert Brooke was famous for his idealism and enthusiasm for war, while Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen encapsulated the anger, frustration, and fear that soldiers were feeling, as well as exploring abstract, moral perplexities.
Dana Gioia wrote, “WWI changed European literature forever. The horror of mechanised warfare and the slaughter of nineteen million young men and innocent civilians traumatised the European imagination for poets. The unprecedented scale of violence annihilated the classic traditions of warfare — individual heroism, military glory, and virtuous leadership.”
Gioia’s quote perfectly illustrates the effect that WWI had on war poets: if you take Lord Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, for example, his main themes were glory, triumph, bravery, King and Country. A lot of poets went into battle expecting to find those themes as true, only to find out that they had been grossly misled by blatant propaganda written by poets who weren’t even on the battlefield themselves.
War poets during WWI drew inspiration from Thomas Hardy, who had written war poems in the 1800s, he famously wrote Drummer Hodge about the Boer War, and utilised colloquialisms to help characterise and humanise the soldiers, showing the connections and almost generational heritage of characteristics of war poems.
Kipling is another interesting character to consider within the world of WWI poetry: he was hugely patriotic and conveyed that in his work, but he became more critical as the war went on and his son was killed. He was frustrated with the authorities and incompetent generals and this began to leak into his poetry: a tone you wouldn’t have expected from reading his early poems at all.
WWI poets became so famous, especially in the 1920s and 30s, that they were actually anticipated in WWII, to the point that the Times wrote an article titled ‘Where are the war poets?’ in 1940. It’s not generally considered a poet’s war, though a few stand out such as Richard Wilbur who held a high level of sympathy for Conscientious Objectors and thought of it as a righteous war against worthy enemies.
Conclusion
War literature is a fascinating genre: it encompasses writers from all walks of life and is a global phenomenon, with war poets dating as far back as the Pre-Islamic Persian wars up to modern-day conflicts and novels being written from varying perspectives that help to keep the realities of war in our collective memories, ensuring that the suffering and bravery of these soldiers will not be forgotten. It’s such a large genre, in fact, that I couldn’t hope to do it proper justice in such a small article, and I’d encourage you to do some more reading on the topic, as well as read some of the literature itself. I’ll conclude with a few personal recommendations:
- Regeneration, the trilogy — Pat Barker
- Birdsong — Sebastian Faulks
- The Girl in the Blue Coat — Monica Hesse
- Dead Man’s Dump — Isaac Rosenberg
- The Verdicts — Rudyard Kipling
- To Any Dead Officer — Siegfried Sassoon
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