The Centennial of a Cataclysm:
One Life, One Family
by Timothy S. Goeglein
“To you from failing hands we throw
The Torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”
John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields,” 1915
One hundred summers ago, one of history’s greatest calamities commenced in Europe. On June 28, 1914, in the city of Sarajevo, now part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were assassinated. Their murders, in the back of an open touring car which had made a wrong turn, lit a torch that set off an inglorious chain of events that would come to include almost every country on that continent and well beyond. The conflagration set Europe aflame for the next four years and changed Western society irrevocably, in a way not seen since the Reformation.
The cataclysm that became known as World War I led to what one poet and literary critic aptly called “the suicide of Europe.” Theodore Dalrymple evocatively wrote that World War I “smashed up European civilization and sapped Europe’s belief in itself: For if the wages of its civilization was such a war, bloody and muddy carnage on so unimaginable a scale, what price its civilization?” The shock of the brutality of the war, replete with the first use of tanks, poison gas, and guns that could kill on an unprecedented scale, is almost beyond our imagination now.
In all of the centennial reflections of World War I, I wonder how many will actually focus on the most personal impact of that brutal implosion: its impact on the families who had to endure the deaths and maiming of their loved ones on a nearly matchless trajectory? In all the reams and tomes written about what became known as the Great War, why is such comparatively little attention paid to the average mother and father, brother and sister, grandparent, aunt and uncle, niece and nephew, and how they responded, coping or failing to cope with the acute sense of loss and despair that is war’s aide de camp?
The biography of one of the most important young poets to emerge during the war, Wilfred Owen, shows the destruction at this distinctly personal scale. Born in 1893 in Wales to a lower-middle-class family—his father was a train stationmaster—Owen spent his boyhood in three towns: Liverpool, Shrewsbury, and Oswestry, the latter a small town surrounded by low mountains. Like many great poets, he was preternaturally shy despite impressive literary gifts that emerged early in life. He was educated at the undistinguished University of Reading.
Like many children of middle-class backgrounds, Owen’s parents had great aspirations for their talented son and tirelessly nourished his abilities. His father was an amateur but lustrous operatic tenor and his mother, too, had an artistic bent. Owen was taken to art galleries and museums to deepen his love of beautiful things, and their attentive parenting seems to have been effective. Those who knew Owen best said he had an obvious love of life. He once wrote of himself that “you would not know me for the poet of sorrows.”
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