NOT ABOUT HEROES
Even to this day World War I is called the “Big War,” and rightfully so. Not only was it the first actual world war, drawing forces from virtually every country in the Northern Hemisphere, but unlike other wars, which were made up of maneuvers, confrontations, and movement, World War I was a battle of endurance, armies facing each other in a line of trenches extending from the Swiss border to the English Channel, with the victory going to the side that wore the other out. Four years of it ended in the loss of more than ten million lives; if it was not “the war to end all wars,” as another popular slogan named it, it was the war that forever made the idea of war unacceptable, a thing to be avoided–at all cost, some felt.
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Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were among those who felt that way. At a time when even such an internationally respected philosopher as Bertrand Russell could be fined and imprisoned for his antiwar opinions, these two men preached the new and dangerous idea called pacifism. Who better to speak out against the war than “Mad Jack” Sassoon, recipient of the Military Cross (roughly equivalent to our Bronze Star) and other distinguished service awards, all of which he threw into the Mersey River after the Bottle of Somme failed to be the “great advance” it was promised to be? (Instead it exacted the greatest number of casualties in British military history.) And what more credible witness to the inhumanity of war than Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, who was awarded his Military Cross “for conspicuous gallantry” a mere month before being killed in action at the age of 25, one week before the signing of the armistice that would end the war?
“Have you forgotten yet?” asks Sassoon. “Look down and swear by the slain of war that you’ll never forget.”
