Anti-War World War II Bertolt

Anti-War

World War II

Bertolt Brecht, German playwright, and Wilfred Owen, poet, had a great deal in common when it came to their writing. Both had been deeply impacted by wars and both felt the need to express their anti-war sentiments and beliefs in their work.

Bertolt Brecht, German playwright, wrote Mother Courage and Her Children (1978 ed) to demonstrate his anti-war sentiments. The play's main character is Anna Fierling, who follows the imperial and Swedish armies with her three children, selling soldiers liquor and other products. Her children die one by one in the play, yet still Mother Courage continues pulling the wagon by herself.

In this light, Brecht criticizes war and business in his writings. Mother Courage's business, like many other businesses of the war era, was entirely dependent upon war. While she was in business to provide for her children, the business ends up killing all three of them.

SERGEANT You're peaceful all right, your knife proves it. Why, you should be ashamed of yourself. Give me that knife, You, hag! You admit you live off the war, what else would you live off? Tell me: how can we have a war without soldiers?

MOTHER COURAGE Do they have to be mine?

SERGEANT So that's it. The war should swallow the pits and spit out of the peach, Huh? (Brecht, p. 427)

Brecht shows that Mother Courage faces a major dilemma: the war kills her children while it fuels her business. Eventually, the writer shows how her negative qualities of selfishness and greed overwhelm the positive qualities of loving her children. Even after she loses all her children, she fails to understand the dependent relationship between the war and business and the fact that the war is her friend and enemy.

Wilfred Owen wrote numerous intense poems based on his personal experience as a soldier. Owen aspired to be a poet since he was a teenager and immersed himself in poetry, especially poems by Keats and Shelley (Roberts, 1998). However, Owen wrote almost no poetry of importance until he served as a soldier in France in 1917. A great deal of war propaganda influenced him to become a soldier and he volunteered in 1915, excited about his new adventure.

Unfortunately, being a soldier was not as glamorous as it had been painted out to be. Owen was transported to the front line in a cattle wagon and was forced to sleep 70 or 80 yards from a heavy gun which fired every minute or so (Roberts, 1998). He walked miles through trenches two feet deep in water. He experienced gas attacks and was exposed on a daily basis to the stench of the rotting dead and horrible conditions. His experiences shocked him and he felt changed his perspective on the meaning of war. "The people of England needn't hope. They must agitate," he wrote home.

Owen managed to escape bullets until the last week of the war, but he saw a lot of front-line action: he was blown up, concussed and shell-shocked. When he was sent to the psychiatric hospital in Edinburgh, he met Siegfried Sassoon, who inspired him to write his war poetry (Roberts, 1998).

Owen was sent back to the trenches in September, 1918, and later won the Military Cross for seizing a German machine-gun and using it to kill a large group of Germans (Roberts, 1998). That same year, he was shot and killed in war.

One of Owen's best examples of anti-war poetry is his Anthem for Doomed Youth (Owen, 1963 ed, pp. 43-44):

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of the boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Owen's poem appears to inspired by the many deaths of soldiers he saw each day in the trenches of war. He starts the poem off, describing innocent young men being sent to war like cattle are sent to slaughter. He abandons his original views of war as heroic and glorious, and describes it as one large funeral where young soldiers are not given a proper goodbye. Instead of the typical church bells that are sounded when someone dies under ordinary circumstances, there are only the sounds of gunshots when a soldier dies, he writes.

A powerful line in this poem reads, "No mockeries now for them; no prayers, nor bells (p. 43)." Owen seems to now believe that traditional rites for death are mockeries. This suggests that he has a new grasp of the meaning of life and death, and he no longer believes that traditional bells and ceremonies are what death it about. For him, these rites mocked a tragic ending.

The second stanza is very powerful as Owen writes how there will be no candles to mourn the dead soldiers, but only the candles of their blazed life seen in their eyes. These moments are their true good-byes, as the last light of consciousness dies. However, he observes that war does not allow soldiers to mourn the dead, which are everywhere.

In this poem, as in many of his others, war has destroyed an age of innocence. His war poems express frustration about how innocent soldiers are hardened by war and eventually killed in many cases. They also express frustration about the attitudes of civilians back home and how many simply ignored the tragic nightmare of the war.