I did not want to intrude, and never asked him about what he was thinking. I did not know if the other man had ever visited the Fuhrer bunker before, but at the site I watched as he walked around the parking lot and perimeter of the site, alone in his thoughts. While under quarantine, I was recently saddened to learn that he passed away. He just smiled and turned our conversation to Mommsen’s History of Rome, which I understood to be his poetic way of implying that everything passes.
When we talked about the day later that evening at dinner, I asked him if he had any thoughts about the site from his previous visits. I knew that one man had been to the site several times before when doing business in Berlin over the years, but was still a little surprised when he decided to stay at the hotel. My most memorable part of the experience of visiting the site is recalling the reactions of two of our guests, both men in their 90s, both veterans who served in World War II, but not in Europe. Although all our guests knew what to expect of the site, a visit to the apartment parking lot that covers the underground bunker today, marked for memory only by a somewhat shabby metal frame and plastic covered historical sign explaining the significance of the place one is standing, and what is underneath your feet, remains a somewhat unsettling experience for anyone with a historical mind or moral conscience. Siegfried Sassoon’s 1918 piece, “Counter-Attack,” offers us the gruesome vision of a battlefield “place rotten with dead” where corpses “face downward, in the sucking mud,/Wallow…” Sassoon’s shocking verbal image recalls the horrible tableau of Nevinson’s dead soldiers lying facedown in the mud.A Museum tour in 2017 visited the Fuhrer bunker in Berlin, site of Hitler’s final demise. Wilfred Owen’s gloomy 1917 “Anthem for Doomed Youth” pictures the war’s fallen “d as cattle,” for example. However, after years of devastating losses and with no clear resolution to the seemingly endless fighting, poets depicting the hard reality of the soldier’s experience gained more recognition.
At the start of the war, when such nationalistic feeling was strong, many British soldiers departed for training with a copy of Brooke’s poems tucked into their kits. At the outset of the war, many Britons were touched by the heroic sentiments of the poems, in particular, “The Soldier.” This poem’s combatant speaker assures the reader that his death in battle will mean that “there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England.” Brooke’s poems pictured military service and death as purifying and noble.
Rupert Brooke’s patriotic ‘1914’ sonnet sequence became hugely popular in the early years of the war. War-related art also had many purposes, whether to document, commemorate, appeal, revise, expose, obscure, or protest.įirst World War literature also presents a range of perspectives. In fact, we could say that British artists and writers witnessed and experienced different wars even though only one conflict is recorded in history. The varied perspectives represented in the First World War art show us that there was not one single uniform war experience for Britons, whether on the battlefield or at home. Though we may read about dates and numbers when we study historic conflicts, the lived reality of a war becomes much more vivid when we look at the diverse creative expressions it inspires. However, like wars throughout history, it inspired a tremendous amount of creative output from artists and writers, civilians and combatants, men and women. World War I, also known as the Great War, was a distinctly modern conflict in many ways. Britain at War, August 5, 1914, letterpress on newsprint, 76.3 x 50.7 cm, published by The Times (Imperial War Museum, London)The crisis would last until Novemand claim millions of lives, with battlefronts in Europe, European waters, and in the Middle and Near East.
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