Head's Blog: Solace
Dear Parents,
I thought that I would share with you an assembly that I gave to the Prep school on Wednesday. As ever, Remembrance Sunday becomes more remote for our children as the years pass and I wanted to try and get them to focus their minds on a particular individual when they stand for the two-minute silence on Friday. This year, I also wanted to highlight the importance of Remembrance, as it is 100 years since the Armistice on 11 November 1918.
I was listening to Radio 4 on Sunday and the poem Anthem for Doomed Youth was being read, and this reminded me of the death of Wilfred Owen (poet and soldier) a week before the end of the First World War. Wilfred Owen was born in 1893, enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles in 1915 and was later commissioned into the Manchester Regiment. He fought in the trenches and was invalided back to Scotland in 1916 as he was suffering from ‘shell shock’, now modern-day PTSD. His nerves were shattered, but he sought solace with other famous war poets at the hospital – Sassoon, Graves and Nichols. Eventually, Wilfred Owen returned to the Western Front – he wrote to his mother and said, ‘I came out in order to help these boys; directly, by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as I can.’ He was awarded a Military Cross for exceptional bravery but was eventually killed on November 4th 1918 – a week before the end of the war.
His poems still hold a huge resonance for me, as they are a comment on the effects of war, based on his experiences and observations, none more so than the poem Dulce et Decorum est. A poem that not only vividly describes a gas attack and its horrendous effects on a soldier that was too slow to put his gas mask on but also a comment on some of the propaganda that was being told to young men and women back in England. There was definitely some irony when he wrote the words (from the Roman poet Horace) – dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – ‘it is sweet and noble to die for one’s country’.
