Preparing for War

Abstract

The modern notion that the Great War came as a complete break in continuity, a shattering surprise to Europe, is a product of post-war mythology rather than of history. The same notion dictates that critics should be astonished at the phrase ‘stunning guns’ in Owen’s ‘Little Mermaid’ (1912) because it seems to foreshadow his war poems, or that they should accept Sassoon’s suggestion that ‘Exposure’ was written a month after its author came out of the trenches, as though front-line experience alone had created Owen’s mature style. The world which Owen grew up in was rife with military activity and prophecies of coming disaster. There had been either a war or a war scare nearly every year since 1895. As a child, he had been photographed in uniform with a home-made rifle and had played what a friend later remembered as battles of ‘attrition’ with toy soldiers. Large-scale Army exercises were reported at length in the newspapers while he was at Dunsden. A bishop said at Keswick in 1912 that the ‘growth of armaments still remains a standing threat to our peace and that of the world’.¹ In art and philosophy, as in many of the political groupings of both right and left, there had been a hunger for action and violence.