Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart

A literature can wait a long time for the voice that will tell its truth, and when that voice finally arrives it is rarely heralded. It comes in a side corridor of a requisitioned hydropathic hotel, in the second month of a nervous convalescence, in the shape of a small dark subaltern with a stammer who is climbing a staircase to ask a more famous man to sign a book. The hinge of a century's poetry can turn on the lifting of a hand to a door.

THE BOY FROM PLAS WILMOT

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born at Plas Wilmot in Oswestry in 1893, into a family of Welsh descent and English-speaking education, raised on the King James Bible, Keats, and a mother's certainty that the eldest son was destined for something. He failed the scholarship to London, taught English at Bordeaux and Bagnères, came home in 1915 and took a commission in the Manchester Regiment because the war was the thing the century was doing and he could not stand outside it. The poems he carried in his kit on the way to France in late 1916 were imitative, ornate, Tennysonian, lit from within by an ear that had not yet found its subject. He had read no living poet of the war whose work seemed to do what the war required.

Then came January and February of 1917 on the Somme: the holding of a flooded dugout at Savy Wood near Saint-Quentin under fourteen days of bombardment, the sentry blinded in front of him, the body of a fellow officer lying for days within sight in a shell-hole that could not be reached. He came out of the line in April with what the regimental doctor wrote down as neurasthenia. By June he was at Craiglockhart War Hospital on the southern outskirts of Edinburgh, in the care of Dr Arthur Brock, who told him plainly in the consultation-room that the injury was real, of the same gravity as a smashed femur, and would heal only by the steady reordering of small daily tasks.

THE LATE AFTERNOON OF THE SEVENTEENTH OF AUGUST

It is the late afternoon of the seventeenth of August 1917. The long northern light comes through the bay windows of the central writing-room. Outside, the lawn slopes down towards the city; inside, the smell is of floor polish and tobacco and the carbolic the hospital uses on the stair-rails. He is twenty-four, in walking-out tunic, the brass of the Manchesters polished. On the table in front of him lies the latest Old Edwardian, the magazine of his old school at Liverpool, in which a poem of his from four years ago has been printed in green ink, looking already, to its author, like the work of a stranger.

In his coat pocket is a letter to his mother, written that morning, not yet sealed. In his other hand is a thin volume bought a fortnight ago in the city: The Old Huntsman, and Other Poems, by Captain Siegfried Sassoon, MC. On the dust-jacket is the photograph of a dark-eyed young officer who has come to Craiglockhart not by way of any breakdown but by way of a public letter declaring that the war was being deliberately prolonged by those who had the power to end it. The patient list pinned to the door of the writing-room places Captain Sassoon in Room 28 on the third floor of the south block.

A SECOND OF TIME IN ENGLISH POETRY

Five copies of the Old Huntsman are upstairs in his room, brought up from Liverpool to be signed and posted to friends. He has been turning the question over for a fortnight. To go up the south stair this afternoon is to present himself, stammering, before the only published poet of the war whose lines do on the page what his own poems have not been able to do, which is to put the trench into the line without lifting it into Tennyson. To wait another day is to wait, in practice, indefinitely; Sassoon is here on a medical pretext that can be revoked at any hour, and a man like that does not stay long in a place like this. He notices his own hand trembling slightly on the magazine and recognises the symptom from Brock's lecture: the small involuntary tremor of a nervous system that has not yet relearned its ordinary courage.

To bring all five copies would be to come as a collector, a schoolboy with autographs. To bring one would be to come as a reader. To bring one of his own poems would be to come as a rival, and to be sent away. The arithmetic is plain and takes him under a minute. He puts the Old Edwardian face down on the table. He puts the unsealed letter to his mother back in his coat pocket. He goes upstairs to fetch one copy of the Old Huntsman from his room, and then up the south stair to the third floor, and stands on the landing for the time it takes a man to fix the knot of his tie, and knocks on the door of Room 28.

Sassoon is at his desk in shirtsleeves and breeches with the window open onto the lawn. He is six feet tall, sharp-featured, formal. He looks up at the small dark officer in the doorway and sees, by his own memoir of 1936, a young Keats: concentrated, blushing, in difficulty with the opening sentence. Sassoon takes the book, signs it, asks him to sit down for a minute. They speak for almost an hour. Sassoon asks 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.

ON THE LAWN

He brings it the next day. The poems are mostly the Keats-imitative pieces from before the trenches; one or two are recent. Sassoon reads them in front of him on the lawn, in the September light, while the gardener's boy mows the grass at the far end and a patient in dressing-gown walks slowly along the gravel path with his hands behind his back. Sassoon does not say what Owen has feared he will say. He says, in effect, that there is a man in this manuscript who has been at the war and has not yet let the war into the poems; that the two pieces in which the writer is visible are this and this; that they will work on them.

They work on them. In a draft of Anthem for Doomed Youth the opening reads what passing-bells for these who die in herds. Sassoon crosses through in herds and writes as cattle in the margin in pencil. The line stays. The corrections are small, the substitutions exact: a stanza shortened, an adjective struck out, a piece of Georgian decoration removed and the bone of the thing left standing. In Owen's letter to his mother of the fifteenth of August he writes, before he has yet met Sassoon, of the hope of becoming a poet's poet. By mid-September, reporting the same lawn conversations, he writes to her: I am held peer by the Georgians; I am a poet's poet. The tone is half boast, half astonishment. It is the tone of a man who has discovered, at twenty-four, what he is for.

Anthem for Doomed Youth is finished in September. Dulce et Decorum Est is drafted in October and rewritten in November after Sassoon, on the lawn one afternoon, tells him that the closing apostrophe to the children ardent for some desperate glory is too genteel, too consoling; that the poem is about a gas attack and a man drowning in his own lungs and ought to end where the lungs end. Owen rewrites the closing on the train back from Edinburgh to Shrewsbury at Christmas. The poem is in its final form by January 1918.

THE PREFACE

He drafts, somewhere in those months at Craiglockhart, a short preface for the book of war poems he intends to publish when the war is over. It is four sentences of plain prose, set down for himself, not for an editor. This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor 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. He folds the page into the manuscript and goes back to the line he is working on. He will not see the book. The preface will outlive him and become the gloss the twentieth century writes upon itself whenever it tries to read the trench.

THE CANAL AT ORS

He returns to active service in August 1918, against the strenuous advice of Sassoon, who is by then in a London hospital with a head wound and tells him, I will stab you in the leg if you try to go back. He goes back. He is awarded the Military Cross at Joncourt on the first of October for an action that included capturing a German machine-gun and turning it on its former crew; the citation, which his mother would later read aloud in the kitchen at Shrewsbury, calls his conduct of the highest order. On the morning of the fourth of November 1918, leading a company of the second Manchesters across the Sambre-Oise Canal at Ors, he is killed at the water's edge while encouraging his men onto the improvised bridge. He is twenty-five years old. The Armistice is seven days away.

THE BELLS AT SHREWSBURY

Susan Owen received the telegram at the village school where she was teaching, on the morning of the eleventh of November 1918, as the church bells of Shrewsbury began ringing for the Armistice. She walked the half-mile home with the bells still going. The collected Poems came out in 1920, edited by Sassoon with Edith Sitwell, the preface set at the front. Sassoon survived the war and three further decades; he told the BBC in 1965 that the most important friendship of his life had been the four months at Craiglockhart, 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.

A literature is changed by what one man dares to bring upstairs in his hand. Craiglockhart is now part of Edinburgh Napier University. The central writing-room is a seminar-room; the door of Room 28 carries a small bronze plate. On the lawn between them, where the corrections were made in pencil, there is no marker at all: only the grass, mown short in summer, and the slope of the ground towards the city.