Poetry and prose on the horrors of war

Bindu Menon

IN 1917, while recuperating from injuries sustained during the First World War, a British officer wrote a letter to his commanding officer, reasoning why he wouldn’t return to military duty. Describing the war as “deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it”, the decorated war hero and poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote, “I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.”

Helping Sassoon draft the letter were pacifists like Bertrand Russell. It was published as ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’ in a few newspapers, read out in the British parliament and became the cause for some heated public debate. Sassoon, who was surprisingly not court-martialled, nevertheless returned to the front the next year, mentored another soldier poet Wilfred Owen, and they together gave heft to the powerful genre of war poetry. While earlier poems on war celebrated the heroic, chivalric and romantic ideals of warfare, Sassoon and others chose to engage with the horrors, trauma and futility of life in the trenches.

This brings us to the issue that Sassoon raised in his letter: the rather problematic question of a “just war”. It is a question that compelled a despondent Arjuna to lay down his weapons when he saw his cousins, uncles and other loved ones flanked on the enemy side before the battle in Kurukshetra. It’s a question that Krishna tried to explicate through the concept of dharma yuddha (just war), moral duty and a righteous, equanimous approach to war in the Bhagavadgita.

It’s also a question that divides public opinion whenever the fragility of peace is tested across the globe. The most recent being the theatre of war playing out in West Asia. The past two months have unleashed a brutal, unrelenting armed conflict, save for a brief humanitarian pause. The bizarre spectacle of bombardments, aerial strikes, shell-shocked children being rescued from under rubble, the wounded being ferried away in stretchers are all being dramatically livestreamed into our living rooms. And we, the viewers, become the tacit, if not complicit, consumers of this spectacular visual experience of war.

Much has been written on the ethics of war, with philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau describing war as not a relation between men, but between states. Immanuel Kant stressed that war is ingrained in human nature and cautioned against the urge to ennoble it without losing sight of the evil that it can unleash.

“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks/Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,” so read the opening lines of a poem by Owen that visually encapsulates the weariness of battle-hardened soldiers. Writers like Ernest Hemingway, too, extended that message to an American audience. His novel ‘A Farewell to Arms’ is a narrative of the retrospective war experience mirrored through the doomed love story of an American soldier and a British nurse. In one of the passages, the ambivalence of the soldier is most explicitly put: “I am embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice… Abstract words such as glory, honour, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

Last year, a former Russian paratrooper Pavel Filatyev wrote in his memoir ‘ZOV’ against what he calls an unjust war unleashed by his country against Ukraine, asking, “If I don’t have the right to say ‘no to war’, why does someone else have the right to start the war?” In a somewhat similar vein but probing the choices in a war, Ukrainian writer Artem Chekh wrote in a piece for The New York Times, “Did I want to fight? Do hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians want to fight? We have children, families, jobs, hobbies, parcels in the mail.” Yet, Chekh finally does volunteer to fight for the “freedom of his land” but is clear that he will not write about the war, nor romanticise it.

War exacts a heavy price long after the guns fall silent, for the soldier and the civilian alike. During the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, a poem by Mahmoud Darwish went viral. It reads thus: “The war will end. The leaders will shake hands. That old woman will remain waiting for her martyred son. And that girl will wait for her beloved husband. And the children will wait for their heroic father. I do not know who sold the homeland. But I know who paid the price.”

The late Palestinian poet knew too well about the human cost of warfare. And about the travesty of a military conflict degenerating into mere bloodletting.

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