Quotations

“Catalogue? Photograph? Can you photograph the crimson-hot iron as it cools from the smelting? That is what Jones's blood looked like, and felt like. My senses are charred.”

Questioning whether ordinary forms of representation could communicate traumatic experience · Letter to Siegfried Sassoon, 10 October 1918

Wilfred Owen

“It is a strange truth: that your Counter-Attack frightened me much more than the real one.”

Acknowledging the extraordinary emotional power that truthful writing about war could possess · Letter to Siegfried Sassoon, October 1918

Wilfred Owen

“I came out in order to help these boys — directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can.”

Defining his double responsibility as both an officer and a witness for his men · Letter to Susan Owen, 4 October 1918

Wilfred Owen

“It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them.”

Expressing his conviction that truthful witness required renewed proximity to soldiers' suffering · Letter to Susan Owen, 31 December 1917

Wilfred Owen

“I hate washy pacifists as temperamentally as I hate whiskied prussianists.”

Rejecting simplistic positions on both pacifism and militarism · Letter, 2 October 1917

Wilfred Owen

“My dear, except in one or two of my letters, you will find nothing so perfectly truthfully descriptive of war. Now you see why I have always extolled Poetry.”

Arguing that poetry can communicate the lived truth of war more powerfully than other media · Letter to Mary Owen, 29 August 1917

Wilfred Owen

“Thus you see how pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism.”

Recognising a conflict between Christian teaching and unquestioning national loyalty · Letter to Susan Owen, May 1917

Wilfred Owen

“And am I not myself a conscientious objector with a very seared conscience?”

Acknowledging the painful contradiction between his convictions and his role as a soldier · Letter to Susan Owen, May 1917

Wilfred Owen

“The sensations of going over the top are about as exhilarating as those dreams of falling over a precipice, when you see the rocks at the bottom surging up to you.”

Comparing an infantry attack to the helpless terror of a falling dream · Letter, 14 May 1917

Wilfred Owen

“For twelve days I did not wash my face, nor take off my boots, nor sleep a deep sleep. For twelve days we lay in holes, where at any moment a shell might put us out.”

Recording the exhausting and precarious conditions of prolonged front-line service · Letter to Susan Owen, 25 April 1917

Wilfred Owen

“The people of England needn't hope. They must agitate. But they are not yet agitated even.”

Urging civilians to respond actively to realities that soldiers were enduring · Letter to Susan Owen, 19 January 1917

Wilfred Owen

“I have not seen any dead. I have done worse. In the dank air I have perceived it, and in the darkness, felt.”

Conveying how the presence of death could be sensed even without being seen · Letter to Susan Owen, 19 January 1917

Wilfred Owen

“Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry. The subject of it is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

Defining compassion for suffering as the central purpose of his war poetry · Unfinished preface, 1918

Wilfred Owen

“This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.”

Rejecting conventional heroic language as inadequate to the realities of war · Unfinished preface, 1918

Wilfred Owen

“God forbid that any bloody struggle should come to darken our picturesque mountains with mourning; let every good Spaniard refrain from taking up arms, whether in the Carlist or the republican cause.”

Original: No permita Dios que ninguna lucha sangrienta venga a enlutar nuestras pintorescas montañas, absténganse todo buen español de pronunciamiento sea en sentido carlista o republicano. — Written by a former Carlist soldier, the letter shows a man wearied by faction and longing for peace among his own people · Letter to the Urretxu town council, 1 September 1869 (Spanish)

José María Iparraguirre

“How quickly Nature takes possession of a deserted battlefield, and goes to work repairing the ravages of man!”

Contrasting nature's patient renewal with the destruction left by human warfare · Essay, Decoration Day, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“The idea of repeopling old battlefields with the shades of vanished hosts is not novel.”

Reflecting on the enduring imaginative power of places marked by warfare and death · Essay, A Note on L'Aiglon, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“Again an open view of the French mountains. I greet France with almost the same emotion as when I first saw Paris seven years ago. I scarcely remember there is a war. I greet you, sweet soil of France.”

Original: Weiter freier Blick in die französ. Berge. Ich grüße Frankreich beinahe mit solcher Erschütterung wie damals, als ich vor 7 Jahren zum 1. Mal Paris sah. Ich denke kaum mehr, daß Krieg ist. Ich grüße Dich, süße Erde von Frankreich. — Written while serving as a German officer, it reveals his enduring emotional attachment to France despite the war · War diary, 10 August 1914 (German)

Ernst Stadler

“I am astonished and delighted at once. I can hardly have deserved it: my military qualities are certainly not exceptional. I owe it chiefly to the captain's kindness.”

Original: Ich bin verwundert und beglückt zugleich. Habe es wohl kaum verdient: meine militärischen Qualitäten sind ja nicht exorbitant. Ich danke es wesentlich der Güte des Hauptmanns. — His modest and faintly ironic response to receiving the Iron Cross · War diary, 1 October 1914 (German)

Ernst Stadler

“Or do I merely see things differently because I lack this kind of bravado, and can imagine and wish for another task in life than to let a shell tear me to pieces.”

Original: Oder sehe ich nur die Dinge anders, weil mir diese Art der Bravour abgeht und ich mir schließlich noch eine andere Aufgabe im Leben denke und wünsche, als mich von einer Granate in Stücke reißen zu lassen. — A stark statement of his desire for a life and purpose beyond warfare · Letter to Thea Sternheim from the front, early October 1914 (German)

Ernst Stadler

“In the end one is too much a creature of nerves to possess the soldierly virtues which popular convention takes for granted and which perhaps really do exist.”

Original: Schließlich ist man doch zu sehr Nervenmensch um die Soldatentugenden zu besitzen, die der populären Convention als selbstverständlich gelten und die es vielleicht auch einmal da gibt. — A deeply personal rejection of conventional expectations of military heroism · Letter to Thea Sternheim from the front, early October 1914 (German)

Ernst Stadler