DAVID MURDOCK COLUMN: On Veterans Day 2021, and writers with military experience

From centuries past to the present, writers have translated their military experience into exquisite imaginative literature. Some are famous for it, like Ernest Hemingway. Some are forgotten, like Archilochus, the semi-legendary Greek poet. In his day, he was famous — and controversial — but his poems exist today only in fragments, resulting in his being largely unknown to the modern world.

There’s a fine line in literature drawn from the writer’s military experience between purely imaginative writing and memoir. How much of the text is the writer’s actual experience? For me, military experience related by the writer as “history” reads like history, and that related as “literature” reads like literature. That’s not a useful distinction, though, that idea of “I know it when I see it.” So, I usually don’t even try to draw that line.

That line might most easily be seen in three writers who served in World War I — J.R.R. Tolkien, Hemingway and Wilfred Owen. Tolkien, best known as the author of such “high fantasy” novels as “The Lord of the Rings,” served in the British Army during the months-long Battle of the Somme in 1916, one of the costliest battles ever fought in terms of casualties.

Obviously, "The Lord of the Rings," which is set in the fictional world of Middle Earth, is not about World War I. However, there has always been a lively discussion of how much Tolkien’s World War I experiences are reflected there. The consensus is that Tolkien’s description of the hellish landscape of Mordor owes much to his experiences at the Somme. Before he was invalided home because of severe illness brought on by the conditions of trench warfare, he witnessed horror upon horror at the Somme. He was so debilitated that he spent the rest of the war serving on military bases in England.

Hemingway served as a volunteer ambulance driver on the Italian Front during the last year of World War I. He was severely wounded in a mortar barrage and spent months recovering from his physical wounds. After the war, he wrote “A Farewell to Arms,” which is generally regarded as semi-autobiographical — the details of the story of Lt. Frederic Henry are not exactly the same as Lt. Ernest Hemingway’s, but their stories are similar. It’s probably accurate to say that the novel is “based on” Hemingway’s true story.

“A Farewell to Arms” has one of the most chilling descriptions of warfare that I’ve ever read. After Henry is wounded and loaded into an ambulance for transport away from the front, he describes the experience, what he sees and hears inside the ambulance — and that includes another soldier dying while in transit. It’s heartrending.

A writer from World War I who writes most “immediately” about his own experience is the English poet Wilfred Owen. His poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” is the single most searing description of military experience that I’ve ever read. The title comes from the Roman poet Horace, who once wrote, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

“Dulce et Decorum Est” is Latin for “It is sweet and fitting …” — Owen leaves out the end of Horace’s quote until the end of the poem. There, he calls Horace’s observation “The old Lie.”

“Dulce et Decorum Est” describes a poison gas attack. Chemical weapons, like the chlorine gas of the poem, came into widespread use during World War I. Describing the victim of the attack whose suffering Owen witnesses, he writes, “In all my dreams before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” Owen was diagnosed with “shell shock,” what we now refer to as PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder — and the poem reads like a PTSD nightmare. It’s horrifying. Unforgettable.

Unlike Tolkien and Hemingway, both of whom I’d read before I left high school, I didn’t encounter Owen until my time in college. Since that first time reading the poem, I’ve read it dozens of times, and it never ceases to affect me deeply. It’s obviously a true story as Owen experienced it. Of that, there is no doubt in my mind.

Since then, I’ve read all of Owen’s slim output of poetry, most of which deals with his time on the Western Front during World War I. His book is so slim because Owen didn’t live long enough to write more — he was killed in action on Nov. 4, 1918, one week before the Armistice ending the war went into effect on Nov. 11, the day we now commemorate as Veterans Day. Almost every biographical account of Owen I’ve ever read mention that his mother received the news of his death as the bells were ringing to announce the end of World War I.

All writers with military experience express it somehow in their work, I think, some more explicitly than others. Some veterans won’t discuss their military stories at all. Some do, and what veterans remember about their experiences sometimes surprises me — some minor detail important enough to stick in their minds but that won’t be found in histories. That’s why I always listen closely to the stories of veterans, however much or little they wish to tell, and however they tell me, in writing or in person.

David Murdock is an English instructor at Gadsden State Community College. He can be contacted at murdockcolumn@yahoo.com. The opinions reflected are his own.

This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: Veterans Day and writers with military experience