ARMISTICE
Carol Ann Duffy (Faber, £12.99)
After this, there will be no more centenaries. With the 100th anniversary of its end, the First World War has passed a milestone on its inexorable slide out of living memory and into history. Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has chosen to commemorate the 1918 armistice with an anthology of 100 poems celebrating peace and reconciliation, responses to the cessation of hostilities in places as far apart in space and time as ancient Greece, Northern Ireland, the United States and Vietnam.
It might ruffle feathers in certain quarters, prompting grumblings that Duffy is downplaying the Allied victory and the sacrifice of our Tommies in a whitewash of political correctness. I would refer them back to my old secondary school History teacher, himself a veteran of a global conflict. “What is the objective of war?” he barked at us during one lesson. “Victory,” piped up one of my classmates. “No, boy!” he pounced, delighted that at least one of us had taken the bait. “The objective of war is peace.” It was one of those light bulb moments when a point had been made that would actually stick.
This book shows how many ways that sentiment can be expressed, how poignantly and in what varied shades. The gut reaction of relief and optimism inspired by the outbreak of peace is captured by Sarah Teasdale’s opener – “There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground/And swallows calling with their shimmering sound” – and by Siegfried Sassoon’s sense of exhilaration as the horror recedes.
But May Wedderburn Cannan writes, in 1918 Paris, of the private grief in the midst of public jubilation, while Ivor Gurney, as “Harsh bugle notes/Rend and embronze the air”, tuts at how quickly people turn once more to trivial things. To Wilfred Owen, a woman’s charms will never again be as sweet again after what’s been lost. And with peace comes the realisation, to both Owen and Walt Whitman, that those they fought and killed were just like them.
Others train their thoughts on the long, unglamorous business of reconstruction. “Things won’t pick/Themselves up, after all,” writes Wisława Szymborska, well aware that all their effort is for the sake of generations that will neither remember nor care what they fought for. It’s a thread picked up and expanded by John Hewitt, who acknowledges that things can’t go back to the way they were, and that, furthermore, war simply accelerates the process of change; and by Alan Gillis, who in the wake of the Troubles finds the idea of “Progress” hollow.
It’s a humbling collection, in which personal grief and national tragedy are as inseparable as human resilience and human folly, and even the brightest of futures will have been built on the bones of the fallen. There are lines here which will bring solace, evoke empathy and provoke anger. But among the words of these grateful survivors one of the most sobering notes is struck by John Balaban’s dry observation, from his In Celebration of Spring, that “Our Asian war is over; others have begun.”
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
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