As we entered the village, its few straggling houses just as
I remembered from when I had googled the place prior to our visit, the car’s sat-nav
immediately guided us to the tiny road that we needed: Rue de la Gare and we slowly drove up the winding, narrow lane. I knew what we were looking for – the wonders
of Google had prepared me well – and suddenly we were upon it: the tiny Ors
Municipal Cemetery nestling in the fields at the side of the road opposite aged farm buildings and adjacent to the railway track. Solitary visitors, we opened the creaking iron gate and
passed the many family graves and tombs, the dates on them confirming the age
and history of the village. And at the far end of the little cemetery I found what we sought.
Beyond the angel bedecked and ornate grey and black polished stone gothic and baroque family tombs stood the neatly arranged rows of 107 white military headstones standing like soldiers to attention on the parade ground - each one bolt upright, pristine, proud, dignified, measured. I walked along the lines reading the inscriptions; as in other such places that we had visited during this pilgrimage I was both humbled and silenced. These young men had come to this land a century ago and then been put to rest here many miles away from their homeland and all that they knew. These stones on the edge of this anonymous but gentle and lovely village the only mark of their short but valiant presence in this world and when the hell of war came to this quiet and gentle place. And there, tucked away near
the back, we came upon the object of our pilgrimage, the simple, unremarkable and
uncelebrated grave of England’s greatest war poet, the most read English poet
after Shakespeare, Wilfred Owen, who had died in Ors on November 4th
1918 – cruelly, just one week before the Great War's guns were finally silenced.
In a sense the gravestone says all there is to know of Owen - a quiet, gentle, brave and eloquent poet/soldier - and of the circumstances of his death and, importantly, its tragic aftermath.
The epitaph simply records:
Lieutenant W.E.S Owen
Manchester Regiment
4th November 1918 Aged 25
"Shall life renew
these bodies?
Of a truth
All death will he annul"
The quote on the headstone was chosen by his mother and is an extract from one of her son's poems, "The End". Thus, the story of Owen's tragic death ends with his mother - the epitaph was her choice of her son's words and with them she wrote the final chapter on her son's brief but glorious life. The story of Owen's final days and their aftermath - and his mother's place in that tale - underscore the awful nature of war. It was apposite indeed that she chose his epitaph.
Owen’s poetry stands tall amongst the greatest literary works not only in our language but in all literature. It is a measure of his great words and how they have resonated and impacted upon our thoughts and perception not only of the Great War but of all wars when one realises that he only had four poems published within his own short life time (he was but 25 when he died). But the power of Owen’s words in those few poems and that brief life are enough; arguably his three greatest – and certainly most well known - works: Anthem for Doomed Youth, Strange Meeting and Dulce et Decorum Est are the yardsticks by which all other war poetry are and must always be judged.
Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Wilfred Owen's powerful and challenging poetry has been one of the major formative influences on my life and beliefs. I first came across his work in my late teens
almost sixty years ago when I studied for my A level
History at Blackpool Technical College. Mr Parkin, the teacher (or “The
Colonel” as we callow teenagers mischievously nicknamed him because of his military bearing, his clipped no nonsense way of speaking, and his military
moustache) suggested that as well as learning only the historical facts of the Great War – the dates, its causes and its
effects to regurgitate in the A level examination - we needed also to “read around” to broaden our understanding of the age and to broaden our own knowledge.
I can see and hear him now standing in front of the class saying "Read some of the poetry of the war poets like Owen or Sassoon" as, bizarrely it seemed then and still seems now over half a century later, we sat in the upstairs room of a Jewish synagogue which the college rented for our little class. I have been forever grateful for Mr Parkin’s advice. When I got home to Preston later that day I left Preston bus station and walked the short distance to Sweeten's bookshop in Fishergate and bought a cheap paperback copy of the Great War Poems. That night I lay in bed reading them and was overcome; the words piercing my brain and setting my thoughts and emotions racing. Those feelings have never left me and still today when I read them my heart races and a lump comes to my throat. Over the years I have found
Owen’s writing increasingly rewarding and gratifying, and although I can recite most of his works without reference to the lines on the page I am still as just angry and as emotionally drained at the end as I was all those years ago when I first came across them. And steadily they have reinforced a growing pacifist outlook and belief. Now, as a confirmed and confessed pacifist, Owen’s
powerful commentary chimes with my own view of the futility, immorality and obscenity of all war.
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Wilfred Owen's draft of his great poem
"Anthem for Doomed Youth"
|
But, having said that, I also recognise that my pacifist
beliefs and love of Owen’s works hides a paradox. The real power of Wilfred
Owen’s biting words are that although
they do indeed question, and perhaps condemn war, they are not written
by a faux pacifist like me, but by a man tried and tested in the heat of battle, a
man highly decorated by his country for his gallantry. Wilfred Owen knew all
about the horrors of the trenches, of gas attacks, and of losing one’s
comrades and friends in the most awful of circumstances. He had been awarded
the Military Cross in October 1918 when he lead his men in storming German
positions: “....for conspicuous gallantry
and devotion to duty....assuming command and showing fine
leadership.....inflicted considerable losses on the enemy....throughout he
behaved most gallantly.....” read the citation. A little over a month later
Owen himself was dead, machine gunned by the retreating enemy as he and his
comrades attempted to cross the little canal that runs through Ors and which
then marked the front line. Owen and his companions lie buried in that little
cemetery and alongside him two soldiers both of whom won the Victoria
Cross, the highest award for gallantry that can be bestowed upon a British
soldier. No, Owen was no shrinking violet, he was a thoughtful and brave
warrior and that is why his poetry has such power and resonance. Although at the outset of the Great War Owen certainly had pacifist leanings such was his personal pride and credo, his honour, his sense of duty and his love of his country that he answered the call to arms. It is this fact that gives his
words a validity and a truth that people like me can never have, no matter how sincere or passionate held are our views. In modern parlance, Owen had been there, seen it and done it - and
he didn’t like what he witnessed. It is why his words carry such raw power, conviction and ultimately truth, he had earned the right to hold his beliefs and to espouse them; he knew what he was talking about.
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Where Wilfred Owen is buried in the military section
of Ors Municipal Cemetery
|
As the War dragged to a conclusion Owen planned to publish a collection of his war poems. He had gathered together many of his works and had begun to write a preface to his book ready for publication. He wrote: “This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet
fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds or lands or anything about glory,
honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not
concerned with poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in
the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense
consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is
why true Poets must be truthful”.
 |
| Picnic by the canal |
Those powerful yet self effacing words “The pity
of war” say it all; read Owen's poems and I defy anyone to again think of war as
an exciting or glorious thing. The last few days of Owen’s short life are dreadful witness to this; they, and their aftermath, are war made real - not the swaggering, bravado Hollywood version or the jingoistic, pumped up glorious, flag waving, military version of war but the
appalling, immoral, mind and gut wrenching reality, tragedy and pity of war. The Great War, and its consequences, brought
death, injury and hardship to millions but to learn of Owen’s final days is to personalise all this and with a dreadful symmetry and inevitability expose what war can really mean to those involved - and not only to the combatants.
Strange Meeting
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”
“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this 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. . . .”
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| The Foresters Cottage as Owen would have seen it. |
So, we stood in the still, little cemetery for a few moments as the bright morning sun, made the surrounding fields with their golden harvest shimmer and the poppies at the fields' edges brilliant scarlet reminders of what had brought us to this place. Still, unspeaking, heads bowed, not wishing to break the silence and the birdsong with trivial or idle words, our eyes averted embarrassed to meet each other's gaze; we were overcome by Owen’s grave and the story that we knew it told. And then, our small gentle homage done, in silent humility, we then retraced our steps back to the car and to the village centre. It
was lunch time, there were no shops to be seen in this tiny hamlet but squashed by the
side of the post office on the main square where a farmer's tractor and harvesting machine stood waiting to be set to work in the surrounding fields, we found a little pathway leading to
a field. Picnic tables were arranged so we sat there and ate our baguette picnic in the
lunchtime sun. At the end of the field were trees and beyond them a canal - the canal –
where Wilfred Owen and his comrades met their death on November 4th 1918. It was adelightful, tranquil setting – but the events of a century ago
hovered overhead. In my mind's eye I could not stop myself from picturing that November autumn morning a century ago when the staccato rattle of machine guns and the cries of men filled the village air.
When Owen and his comrades came
to Ors, the Great War was drawing to its close. The German army were in retreat
and many thousands had already surrendered. On October 31st Owen and his men
took refuge in the cellar of a forester’s cottage in a wood on the edge of the
village and that night Owen wrote to his mother, Susan, who lived in his home
town, Oswestry. He wrote:
Dearest Mother,
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The cellar where Owen and his comrades
sought refuge.
|
I will call the place
from which I'm now writing "The Smoky Cellar of the Forester's
House". I write on the first sheet of the writing pad which came in the
parcel yesterday. Luckily the parcel was small, as it reached me just before we
moved off to the line. Thus only the paraffin was unwelcome in my pack. My
servant & I ate the chocolate in the cold middle of last night, crouched
under a draughty Tamboo, roofed with planks. I husbanded the Malted Milk for tonight
and tomorrow night. The handkerchief and socks are most opportune, as the
ground is marshy, and I have a slight cold!
So thick is the smoke
in this cellar that I can hardly see by a candle 12 inches away, and so thick
are the inmates that I can hardly write for pokes, nudges, and jolts. On my
left, the Company Commander snores on a bench, other officers repose on wire beds
behind me. At my right hand, Kellett, a delightful servant of A Company in the Old
days radiates joy & contentment from pink cheeks and baby eyes. He laughs
with a signaller, to whose left ear is glued the receiver; but whose eyes
rolling with gaiety show that he is listening with his right ear to a merry
corporal, who appears at this distance away (some three feet) nothing but a
gleam of white teeth & a wheeze of jokes.
Splashing my hand, an
old soldier with a walrus moustache peels & drops potatoes in the pot. By
him, Keyes, my cook, chops wood; another feeds the smoke with the damp wood.
It is a great life. I
am more oblivious than alas! yourself, dear Mother, of the ghastly glimmering
of the guns outside & the hollow crashing of the shells.
There is no danger
down here - or if any, it will be well over before you read these lines.
I hope you are as warm
as I am, as serene in your room as I am here; and that you think of me never in
bed as resignedly as I think of you always in bed. Of this I am certain you
could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me
here."
Ever Wilfred X
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Owen's writing is inscribed on the walls of the sweeping
pathway leading to the cellar at the Forester's Cottage.
|
But the story of Owen’s death, terrible though it was, does
not end there. There is an awful sting in the tail which makes the whole story
almost too terrible to retell and which details the awful and pitiful sorrow of
war.
Exactly one week, seven days, after the dreadful deaths by the side of
that little canal in that beautiful but nondescript French village the Great
War officially ended with the armistice on November 11th 1918. And as people
throughout Europe thanked their God and
in Britain wild celebrations began, Susan Owen listened to the Oswestry church
bells ringing out - as they were throughout Britain - proclaiming that the war was
over. As parents, children, wives, grand parents girl friends, brothers and sisters throughout the land looked forward to their "soldier boys" returning home from France she, too, would have dreamed of her son's safe return. It was not to be. Amongst all the wild celebrations of the day a telegram from the War Office in London arrived in Oswestry informing her of Wilfred’s
death a week before under enemy fire. And, four days later in that same week, she received the letter that he had written on October 31st in that cellar, telling her that he was well and she should not be worried, that "There is no danger down here - or if any, it will be well over before you read these lines".
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| In the darkened room the words of Owen's poems projected as they are spoken |
It is difficult to find the words to comprehend the awful desolation hopelessness that Susan Owen must have
felt as she read the dreaded telegram and saw her cheering, happy neighbours - and then to have the knife so dreadfully and cruelly turned inside her by receiving the posthumous letter telling her not to worry and that he was well, that there was no danger. What dreadful symmetry is that? It truly is the stuff of nightmares, enough to profoundly mark the bravest most callous person for the rest of their life. If it was the plot of a novel or a Hollywood blockbuster it would be dismissed as "far fetched". For me the only words that come close to describing the sheer obscenity and awfulness of a world at war that allows this sort of thing to occur are those used by Owen himself in
his overwhelmingly powerful and biting poem “Dulce
Et Decorum Est”. The final dreadful words to that great poem – arguably the greatest words of all the war poems and by the greatest of the war poets – say it all:
“My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory
The old lie: Dulce et Decorum, est
Pro patria mori”
(“Dulci et Decorum Est
Pro patria mori” is a quote from the Roman poet Horace and means “It is sweet
and honourable to die for one’s country” )
 |
| Susan Owen, Wilfred's mother. |
And so, with this terrible story in mind we left our picnic place, where Owen had met his dreadful
end, for the last stage in our journey in Ors. To the edge of the village and
to that little wood and on the edge of the wood a brilliant white house – the Maison
Forestiere – that forester’s cottage where Owen had spent his last days and from where he had written to his mother in far off Oswestry. The house has been turned not into a museum but a commemoration, a gentle shrine to
Wilfred Owen and his comrades.
A broad sweeping, curved path leads to the cellar, the wall of the pathway beautifully engraved with the words of Owen’s poems and his letter to his mother. Step through the door at the end of the walkway and you are suddenly in the cellar, empty and unchanged since 1918. No more gleaming white walls, no more bright minimalistic, modernistic architecture but aged, unchanged brickwork and gloomy shadows. It is damp and musty, earthy as the grave; there is no light save that from a tiny window that just peeps above the outside earth. One can imagine Owen and his fellow soldiers squashed in here just as he described to his mother; it is a place where you can almost touch the past, feel the shadows of the men who had been there on those fateful days in late 1918; redolent with the atmosphere of its history. It is a place to visit, to think, to reflect upon what it harbours. It is not a place to linger or to enjoy – I found it suffocating, such is its oppressive and tragic story.
The low, arched roof must have caused problems for any of Owen's men taller than me. As I stood, my head almost reaching the damp brickwork above, the weight of its dreadful history bore down and whispered "Go, leave this place to its past and to its ghosts". Above, the house has been
opened up, where once there would have been small rooms there is now a large and high
open space going up into the roof void. It is darkened, Bible black, silent, walls white and bare; you are isolated
from the world outside. No bird song enters here, no sun or blue sky lights the room, no view of the outside woodland distracts your attention.......and then, as you stand in the blackness, confused, disorientated, ill at ease with where you are, the words of Owen's great poems, in English and French are fed through hidden
speakers. And as they are spoken each poem's lines flicker like shell bursts upon the walls; in the darkness your senses are assaulted by Owen's great and dreadful words
speaking as from the grave and across the years, telling of man's inhumanity to man and of the unimaginable horror and obscenity of war
A broad sweeping, curved path leads to the cellar, the wall of the pathway beautifully engraved with the words of Owen’s poems and his letter to his mother. Step through the door at the end of the walkway and you are suddenly in the cellar, empty and unchanged since 1918. No more gleaming white walls, no more bright minimalistic, modernistic architecture but aged, unchanged brickwork and gloomy shadows. It is damp and musty, earthy as the grave; there is no light save that from a tiny window that just peeps above the outside earth. One can imagine Owen and his fellow soldiers squashed in here just as he described to his mother; it is a place where you can almost touch the past, feel the shadows of the men who had been there on those fateful days in late 1918; redolent with the atmosphere of its history. It is a place to visit, to think, to reflect upon what it harbours. It is not a place to linger or to enjoy – I found it suffocating, such is its oppressive and tragic story.
 |
The Forester's Cottage today beautifully and sympathetically
remembers Owen and what happened at Or
|
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The gateway to the cemetery where
each year on November 4th the French
villagers gather to remember English soldiers
and one of the greatest English poets
|
There is at Ors no Wilfred Owen theme park to entertain or to
celebrate one of England's – indeed the world’s – greatest poets or to retell the
story of the place. There are no interactive museums or Wilfred Owen gift
shops selling volumes of his work or unsuitably embellished stationery or tastelessly decorated tea towels. There is no pub flying Union flags or selling Wilfred Owen ale or Oswestry vin rouge. There is no fast food joint enticing the madding crowds with Wilfred Owen burgers or the Wilfred Owen plat du jour. No, there is just a tiny, unremarkable, quiet and unassuming French village that one can drive
through in less than a couple of minutes. Its day to day life goes on as it has done for centuries but neither the village nor its residents are ignorant or dismissive or uncaring of Owen's story and of his importance - in fact the opposite. They remember him with a quiet dignity and, above all respect, that seems to me to be most appropriate for this gentle unassuming man who had the gift of words to express his quiet but powerful beliefs and to tell the truth of the horrors that he was witness to. The village’s little school is
named after Wilfred Owen and each year on November 4th the whole
village congregate at that bleak but beautiful little cemetery at the end of Rue de la Gare on the edge of the harvest rich fields and near the railway track to pay their tribute and listen to the great but terrible words of the poet soldier. They quietly acknowledge - celebrate would be the wrong word - Wilfred Owen and his great words
which have, for so many years forcibly reminded us of what he so rightly called “the pity
of War”. From what I know of Wilfred Owen, this gentle but valiant man, I think that he might have been
satisfied with that.
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
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