War and Conscience: Wilfred Owen
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| Illustration by ChatGPT |
Note: Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was an English poet and soldier whose writings captured the brutality and pity of war, particularly World War I. He was killed in action at the age of 25.
War is often narrated in
the language of glory. “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country,”
classical Roman poet Horace told us. [Wilfred Owen called that “the old lie” in
a poem whose title was Horace’s maxim.] Mussolini elevated war as an expression
of masculinity and vitality. “War is to man what maternity is to woman,” he
said. And in our own times, Donald Trump, the man who thinks of himself as the
Emperor of the World, said, “We (USA) will have so much winning if I get
elected that you may get bored with winning.”
Nations speak of honour, sacrifice,
and victory, as though bloodshed could be clothed in dignity. We can understand
the grand rhetoric on honour and sacrifice. But beneath that rhetoric lies a
quieter and more troubling question: what happens to the human conscience when
it is asked to participate in organised violence in the name of honour and
sacrifice?
Few have answered this question with
the clarity and anguish of Wilfred Owen. Owen didn’t write about war as an
abstraction. He lived in its trenches, breathed its poison gas, and watched
young men reduced to broken bodies and haunted minds. His poetry is not a
celebration of victories in wars. His poetry is a protest against war.
In the
poem whose title was Horace’s maxim, Owen offered a first-hand account of
the horrific suffering that soldiers faced on the front line of WWI. No soldier
is happy to kill and/or die in wars. “Bent double, like old beggars under
sacks,” young men march with their guns levelled against people whom they have
had nothing to do with. “Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, (they) cursed through
sludge…” dying not in glory but in terror. The real enemy is not the man
across the trench; it is the machinery of war itself, which is pure evil.
War causes a lot more than physical
suffering and material destruction. It inflicts severe injury on conscience.
War demands obedience. It requires men to kill not out of personal hatred but
out of duty. In doing so, it creates a fracture within the self: the human
instinct for empathy is forced into silence, while violence is justified as a
glorious necessity.
War normalises what
conscience would otherwise reject outright.
War makes life a nightmare. Owen
thinks of the cosmos as either cruelly indifferent or else malignant, certainly
incapable of being explained in any rational manner. A loving God is
nonexistent, impossible.
In the poem ‘The Show,’ as the speaker
gazes upon a desolate, war-ravaged landscape, it changes gradually to a dead
soldier’s face, infested by thousands of caterpillars. The barbed wire of
no-man’s-land becomes the scraggly beard on the face. The shell holes become
pockmarked skin. At the end of the poem, Owen identifies himself as the severed
head of a caterpillar and the many legs, still moving blindly, as the men of
his command from whom he has been separated. The putrefying face, the sickening
voraciousness of the caterpillars, and the utter desolation of the ruined
landscape become symbolic of the lost hopes for humanity.
Owen died before the World War ended.
The bitter irony is that the soldier who fought for the honour and glory of his
country did not even survive to see that glory and honour.
Of course, that is not Owen’s
complaint. He asks us: Will you continue to believe the noble lies of war
once you have seen its truth? When you read Owen’s poetry, you can’t repeat
phrases like ‘honour’ or ‘glory’ without hesitation. War is not a romantic
affair as it would appear to one listening to political rhetoric about the
country’s honour and glory. Owen makes us see with a clear conscience that we
are morally implicated in the war. He tells us that we too are part of the war
machinery if we accept its language uncritically.
Owen disturbs us with more questions.
Can we retain our humanity within war? Can we resist the numbing of empathy?
Can we mourn the enemy as well as the friend?
We live in a time when wars are
fought not only on battlefields or battle-skies but also through screens and
slogans. Hence the danger of indifference is even more poignant. We are
involved! Yes, we are part of the war when we are its witnesses. When we uphold
those slogans.
And our conscience fades.
To remember Wilfred Owen is to resist
that fading.
Behind every uniform is a human
being. Behind every act of war is a moral cost.
PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026
Previous Posts in this series
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I had really thought your series had ended with Zygmunt Bauman. Also given your unusually long silence. That you were resting like God, on the Sabbath, after His six days of work was over. Glad you reappeared and resurrected yourself in Owen, the young warrior, who was ready to metamophose himself in the ugly and decaying face of war - the merchandise of the macho and the powerful, devoured by their greed, normalized as patriotism of glory and honour for the father/mother land. Pope Francis, like his successor Leo, was against war, in toto. No ifs and buts, just and just. War, for Francis war was evil, because it causes suffering, feeding the egos of the powerful, who reap glory through the weaponizstion and the Kshatraization of the nations. Turn "swords into ploughshares and shields into pruning hooks... And burn the boots soaked in blood" - Isaiah. The nations shall learn war no more. Let Owen, who decried the reality of World War - I speak to us, past World War - II to us, already in an unnamed World War - III. Your Blogs are so many Little Pockets, of Resistance... " Peter, put your sword back into its sheath. For one who lifts the sword, shall die by it. "
ReplyDeleteHari OM
ReplyDeleteWonderful Working of the true meaning of War. The War poets were excellent but Owen, perhaps, the most accessible of them. The Wilfulness of the Warmongers, Worrisome indeed... YAM xx