On June 4th, 1916, he was commissioned in the Manchester Regiment. His early training took place in London, where he visited the Poetry Bookshop—Harold Monro was “very struck” by some sonnets of Owen’s, and “told me what was fresh and clever, and what was second-hand and banal; and what Keatsian, and what ‘modern’,” (letter of March 5th, 1916). Military training he found, as most ‘temporary’ soldiers find it, both arduous and tedious; apart from the discipline it inculcated, it was inevitably a playing-at-soldiers which could be only the sketchiest preparation for the realities of active service. In August, Owen contemplated a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps: “Flying is the only active profession I could ever continue with enthusiasm after the War.” But he was too useful an infantry officer to release, and at the end of the year he received his orders to go out to France.

Little need be added to the picture of Owen’s life during the next twenty-three months, which Edmund Blunden gave in his Memoir.* His first tour of duty, on the Somme sector, proved his staunchness as a man and made the fibre of his best poetry. This rapid maturing is seen not only in his verse but in his letter-writing, which loses its former doubts and affectations, and gains in honesty and eloquence. It is instructive to compare the passage quoted in Blunden’s Memoir (p. 173), beginning “But chiefly I thought of the very strange look on all faces in that camp,” with a passage written a year earlier, when Owen was at the Etaples transit camp on his way to the front:

On all the officers’ faces there is a harassed look that I have never seen before, and which in England never will be seen—out of jails. The men are just as Bairnsfather has them—expressionless lumps.

Letter of January 4th, 1917.

For those who have no memories of the First War, two things need to be said. For the combatants on the Western Front it became, compared with the Second War, a static one. In every sector, its background was very much the same—a desolate landscape of trenches, craters, barbed wire, ruined buildings, splintered trees, mud, the corpses of animals and men. Writing home on February 4th, 1917, Owen described

the universal pervasion of Ugliness. Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language …. everything, unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.

Yet, though this ubiquitous landscape surpassed all the imagined horrors of Dante’s Inferno, it provided the soldier poets with a settled familiar background, while trench warfare gave them long periods of humdrum passivity. Such conditions—a stable background, a routine-governed outer life—have so often proved fruitful for the inner lives of poets that we may well attribute the excellence of the First-War poetry, compared with what was produced in the Second War—a war of movement—partly to the kind of existence these poets were leading: another reason could be, of course, that they were better poets.

Secondly, we shall not fully understand the poetry of protest written by Owen, Sassoon and others, unless we realize how great was the gulf between the fighting man and the civilian at home, and between the front-line soldier and the brass-hat. To the soldier, those on the other side of the barbed wire were fellow sufferers; he felt less hostility towards them than towards the men and women who were profiting by the war, sheltered from it, or wilfully ignorant of its realities. Shortly after Owen was sent for a second time out of the line—a victim of ‘neurasthenia’ caused, he said, by “living so long by the disiecta membra of a friend”, he wrote (letter of May 2nd, 1917),

Already I have comprehended a light which will never filter into the dogma of any national church: namely that one of Christ’s essential commands was. Passivity at any price! Suffer dishonour and disgrace, but never resort to arms. Be bullied, be outraged, be killed; but do not kill …

Christ is literally in no man’s land. There men often hear his voice. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life—for a friend.

Is it spoken in English only and French? I do not believe so.

This was not the Christ of Owen’s religious upbringing; it was the one whom David Gascoyne addressed many years later as ‘Christ of Revolution and of Poetry’. He appears again in a letter Owen wrote to Osbert Sitwell on July 4th, 1918, when he was training troops in England and himself preparing to return to the front;

For 14 hours yesterday I was at work—teaching Christ to lift his cross by numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst till after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were not complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands at attention before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.

Wilfred Owen went back to the front line because he felt that there he would be in a stronger position to voice his protest against the war, and speak for his comrades. On October 4th, 1918, he wrote home about the action in which he won his Military Cross, a battle which

passed the limits of my Abhorrence. I lost all my earthly faculties, and fought like an angel … You will guess what has happened when I say I am now commanding the Company, and in the line had a boy lance-corporal as my Sergeant-Major. With this corporal, who stuck to me and shadowed me like your prayers, I captured a German Machine Gun and scores of prisoners …

My nerves are in perfect order.

A month later, to the day, he was killed.

What Wilfred Owen’s future as a poet would have been, had he survived the war, it is impossible to say. War is the subject of nearly all his best poems, and a reference point in others, such as Miners. It is true that he wrote a few poems of great merit on other subjects.