1919 In the last year of the First World War a shell-shocked Wilfred Owen was treated at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland (see also 22 July). Here he met Siegfried Sassoon – something that was influential on the poetry Owen was writing. It shows a remarkable development over these months, notably his masterpiece, ‘Strange Meeting’. It opens:
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
Unfortunately for Owen, the treatment at Craiglockhart, under the brilliant psychotherapist A.J. Brock (Sassoon was treated by the equally brilliant William Rivers), was the best to be had anywhere. Craiglockhart did not cure Owen, but it rehabilitated him sufficiently to be returned to the Front in September 1918. Following the ever-bloodier battles of 1917–18, there was an urgent need for men, particularly trained officers, for the ‘last push’. He was, he informed Sassoon, ‘in hasty retreat to the Front’. The shells, he said, ‘scream at me every time: “Haven’t you got the wits to keep out of this?”.’
In October 1918 Owen won the Military Cross by capturing a German machine gun. He claimed, in a letter, to have killed only one of the enemy, with his revolver. The official (and witness-verified) commendation for his Military Cross reports differently:
He personally manipulated a captured machine gun in an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallantly.
Oddly enough, it was in the same battleground, at the Sambre-Oise Canal, that Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby is recorded as doing heroic things with a machine gun, and winning his Montenegran medal for gallantry.
Owen was killed on 4 November, by rifle fire. His family were informed by telegram, a week later, as bells rang across England to celebrate the long-awaited Armistice, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. He was 25 years old. If he had lived, as did his comrades Robert Graves (who rather despised Owen, and hinted at cowardice) and his fellow homosexual, Siegfried Sassoon, would he have developed as a poet (as, arguably, Graves did and Sassoon didn’t)?
Almost a year after his death, on 30 July 1919, his family received his Military Cross.