Owen · 1917
Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart
Wilfred Owen, second lieutenant of the Manchester Regiment, was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh in June 1917 with shell-shock after fourteen days under bombardment in a flooded cellar at Savy Wood near Saint-Quentin. He was twenty-four years old. He had not yet published a poem he would later wish to be known by. On the seventeenth of August 1917 he met Captain Siegfried Sassoon, the published war-poet, who had been sent to Craiglockhart for a different reason, namely his refusal to serve any longer in protest at the war. The four months they overlapped at Craiglockhart, during which Sassoon read Owen's drafts and pushed back, were the four months Owen learned what he was. He drafted *Anthem for Doomed Youth* in September with Sassoon's pencilled corrections in the margins; he wrote *Dulce et Decorum Est* in October and rewrote it in November after Sassoon told him the framing was too genteel. He went back to the front in August 1918, was awarded the Military Cross at Joncourt on the first of October, and was killed crossing the Sambre–Oise Canal at Ors on the morning of the fourth of November 1918. The telegram reached his mother at Shrewsbury on the eleventh of November as the Armistice bells were ringing.
It is the late afternoon of the seventeenth of August 1917, in the central writing-room at Craiglockhart War Hospital, on the southern outskirts of Edinburgh, in the long autumn light through the bay windows. He is twenty-four years old. He is Second Lieutenant Wilfred Edward Salter Owen of the Manchester Regiment, born at Plas Wilmot in Oswestry to a family of Welsh descent and English-speaking education, in the second month of his treatment for what the army still calls neurasthenia, what his mother's letters call shellshock, and what his attending physician Dr Arthur Brock has explained to him in the consultation-room is a real injury, of the same gravity as a smashed femur, and is going to need months of patience and the steady reordering of small daily tasks before it heals.
He has, in his hand, the latest issue of The Old Edwardian, the magazine of his old school at Liverpool, in which a poem of his that he wrote four years ago has been printed in green ink. He has, in his pocket, a volume of The Old Huntsman by Captain Siegfried Sassoon, MC, on the dust-jacket of which is the photograph of a dark-eyed young captain who has just been sent to Craiglockhart from his battalion in protest at the conduct of the war. He has, on the table, a letter to his mother that he has written and not yet sealed.
He thinks: Sassoon is in this hospital. Sassoon's name is on the patient list pinned to the door of the writing-room. Sassoon is in Room 28 on the third floor of the south block.
He thinks: Sassoon is the only published poet at the war I have read whose poems do what I have not been able to make my own poems do, which is to take the trench and put it into the line without lifting it into Tennyson.
He thinks: if I do not knock on Sassoon's door this afternoon I will not knock on Sassoon's door at all.
He thinks: I have five copies of the Old Huntsman with me to be signed. I cannot bring all five.
He thinks: I will bring one. I will bring the Old Huntsman alone, and not any of my own poems, and we will see whether he is the kind of man you can speak to.
He puts the magazine aside. He puts the letter to his mother in his coat pocket. He goes up the south stair to the third floor and knocks on the door of Room 28.
Sassoon is at his desk in his shirtsleeves and breeches, with the window open onto the lawn. He is six feet tall, sharp-featured, formal in manner. He looks up. Owen, blushing, stammering, says by his own letter to his mother written that night that he had come to ask Captain Sassoon to sign a copy of The Old Huntsman. Sassoon, by his own memoir of 1936, says that the young officer in the doorway looked, more than anything, like a young Keats: small, dark, concentrated. Sassoon takes the book. He signs it. He asks Owen to sit down for a minute. They speak for almost an hour. Sassoon asks Owen if he writes. Owen says, with some reluctance, yes, although nothing of any value yet. Sassoon asks to read what he has. Owen says he will bring it the next day.
He brings it the next day. The poems Owen has at Craiglockhart in August 1917 are mostly Keats-imitative pieces from before the trenches. Sassoon reads them in front of him on the lawn. He does not say what Owen has feared he will say (which is that they are not poems, that the writer should give it up). He says, in effect: there is a man in here who has been at the war and not yet got the war into the poems. The two pieces he can see the writer in are this and this. We will work on them. Owen, by his own letter, leaves Sassoon's room that evening with the manuscript of Anthem for Doomed Youth in draft and a list of small marginal corrections in pencil, the most consequential of which is on the line what passing-bells for these who die in herds, which Sassoon has crossed through and replaced with who die as cattle. The line stays.
Anthem for Doomed Youth is finished in September. Dulce et Decorum Est is drafted in October and revised in November after Sassoon, on the lawn one afternoon in early November, tells him the closing apostrophe to the children ardent for some desperate glory is too kind. Owen rewrites the closing on the train back from Edinburgh to Shrewsbury at Christmas. The poem is in its final form by January 1918. Owen returned to active service in August 1918, was awarded the Military Cross at Joncourt on the first of October for an action that involved capturing a German machine-gun and turning it on its former crew, and was killed leading a company of the second Manchesters across the Sambre–Oise Canal at Ors on the morning of the fourth of November 1918. He was twenty-five years old. Sassoon survived the war, the 1920s, the Second World War, and three further decades; he died in 1967, eighty years old. He told the BBC in 1965 that the most important friendship of his life had been the four months at Craiglockhart with Owen, and that the poems Owen had written in the weeks immediately after their first conversation in Room 28 had taught him, Sassoon, what war poetry could do that he had not himself, in the Old Huntsman, been able to do.
Owen's mother received the telegram of his death on the morning of the eleventh of November 1918, at the village school in Shrewsbury where she was teaching, as the church bells of the town began ringing for the Armistice. The collected Poems came out in 1920, edited by Sassoon and Edith Sitwell, with a preface Owen had drafted at Craiglockhart that has come to stand for the whole question of what war poetry is for. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Craiglockhart Hospital is now part of Edinburgh Napier University; the writing-room is a seminar-room with a bronze plaque on the door. Room 28 in the south block is, after a hundred-year correction of the historical record, marked too. The seminars Owen and Sassoon held on the lawn are not.